The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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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As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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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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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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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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Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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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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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 wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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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.
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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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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
BERNARD MALAMUD