Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
BERNARD MALAMUDPolitics isn’t in my nature.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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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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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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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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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I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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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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Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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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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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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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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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
BERNARD MALAMUD