To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
BERNARD MALAMUDThe short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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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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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
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We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
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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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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.
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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
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Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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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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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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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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You see in others who you are.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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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.
BERNARD MALAMUD