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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.

Bernard Malamud

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

Across Anger Coal Hot
If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Few Forget Jokes Remind
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Illusion Joy Life Loss
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Reading Surprise Worth
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
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
We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Poor Poverty Sick
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
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Happiness Plus Space
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Baseball Mythology Quality
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ideas Reform Revision Work Writing
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Knowledge Littles Sometime
All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Accomplishment Littles People
It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diversity Justice Know Learn Men
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

The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.

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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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