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You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

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
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Clay Past Recapture Time
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Who You Are Writing
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
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing
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
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Baseball Mythology Quality
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Suffering Taught Uselessness
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
Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Down Forever Hurt Obstacles Overnight
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

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

Illusion Joy Life Loss
All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Jew Knows Men
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
Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Teaching Uncertainty Writing
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Boring Live Mode Writing

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

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You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

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Popular Authors

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