A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUDA man had to learn, it was his nature.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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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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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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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
BERNARD MALAMUD