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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

Bernard Malamud

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Across Anger Coal Hot
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Broken Expect Heart
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing
How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Believe Both God Stranger
To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Character Discipline Writing
Writers who can’t invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn’t paint people, so he painted chairs.
BERNARD MALAMUD

People Stories Style
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
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Who You Are Writing
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Illusion Joy Life Loss
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Civilized Language Persecuted
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Draft Firsts Learn Stories
… 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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Believe Cloud Sky
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?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Adventure Moon Stars
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

For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

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Popular Authors

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