We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
BERNARD MALAMUDTeach yourself to work in uncertainty.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
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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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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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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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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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All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
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You see in others who you are.
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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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Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
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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 writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
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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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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD