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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Bernard Malamud

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
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Identity Who You Are
For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Blame Giving Misery
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Knowledge Littles Sometime
A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Constructs Freedom Invent Men
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Back Children Games Love
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Draft Firsts Learn Stories
It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
BERNARD MALAMUD

Biography Done Want Yelling
One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Fantasy Funn Marriage Return
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Baseball Mythology Quality
… 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
We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Human Relations Stranger World
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing
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
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Metaphor Sometimes Two

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

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