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.
BERNARD MALAMUDIthink Isaid’All menare Jews excepttheydon’t know it.’I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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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….
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You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
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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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Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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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.
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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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Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD







