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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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

Bernard Malamud

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  Ithink Isaid’All menare Jews excepttheydon’t know it.’I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.

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• 

  If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

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  Life is a tragedy full of joy.

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  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.

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  There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

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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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  Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.

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  The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

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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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  We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.

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  A 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.

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  Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

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

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  In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

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