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 MALAMUDIt’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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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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Ithink 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.
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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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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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
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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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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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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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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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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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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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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?
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
BERNARD MALAMUD