How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUDFirst drafts are for learning what your story is about.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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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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There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.
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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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If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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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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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
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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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One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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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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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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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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We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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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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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?
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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.
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There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
BERNARD MALAMUD