We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
BERNARD MALAMUDThe first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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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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Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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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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It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
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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.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
BERNARD MALAMUD