First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUDA man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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You see in others who you are.
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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
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Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
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… it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
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Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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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.
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All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
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Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD