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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Bernard Malamud

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Frivolous Leisure Matter
If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Few Forget Jokes Remind
You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Men Pity Surprise
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Happiness Plus Space
We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Life Live Suffering Two
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Knowledge Littles Sometime
We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Poor Poverty Sick
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Clay Past Recapture Time
A man had to learn, it was his nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Learning Men Nature
There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Fixers Wrong
Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Charity Giving Havens
First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Firsts Ideas
There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Dark Experiences Mystical Self
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Reading Surprise Worth
And if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diminishing Humanity Small Some Withdraw

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

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