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If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

Bernard Malamud

All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Jew Knows Men
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Suffering Taught Uselessness
Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Sadness Tragedy Wine
First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Firsts Ideas
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Reading Surprise Worth
Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Looks Lost Mind
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
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Believe Both God Stranger
It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
BERNARD MALAMUD

Biography Done Want Yelling
As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Long Men Perseverance
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pages Self Stories
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Dark Experiences Mystical Self
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Boring Live Mode Writing
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
A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Constructs Freedom Invent Men

If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

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If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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