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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

Bernard Malamud

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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Uselessness
Taught
Suffering

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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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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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter.
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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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We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn't work, begin something else.
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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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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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The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
Bernard Malamud
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
Bernard Malamud