One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
BERNARD MALAMUDSomewhere 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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
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When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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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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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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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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You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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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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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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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?
BERNARD MALAMUD