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The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

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

Boring Live Mode Writing
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
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
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Clay Experience Past
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

Insects Loneliness Lonely Matter Men Stars
Politics isn’t in my nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Nature Politics Work
How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Assuming Discipline Matter Works
For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Blame Giving Misery
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Happiness Plus Space
I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Confusion Giving Order
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pages Self Stories
One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Apparteally Attempt Confusion Experience Time Uncontrolled
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 purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Freedom Others Purpose
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing
No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Across Anger Coal Hot
You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ease Language Thirst
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Suffering Taught Uselessness
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Identity Who You Are
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Who You Are Writing
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ideas Moving Writing
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Circles Cutting Experts
You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Men Pity Surprise
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Draft Firsts Learn Stories
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diminishing Humanity Small Some Withdraw

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

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The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

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Popular Authors

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