The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUDRevision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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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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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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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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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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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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If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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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.
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Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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… it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
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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.
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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.
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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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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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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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Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD