It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.
BERNARD MALAMUDTo any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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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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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
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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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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
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Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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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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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
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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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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….
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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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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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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.
BERNARD MALAMUD