One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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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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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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
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As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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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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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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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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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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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.
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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.
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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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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUD