Quote

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.

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
Stories
Learns
Best
Crack
Come
Cracks
Right
Eventually
Real
Track
Way
Mystery
Written
Everyone

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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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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... 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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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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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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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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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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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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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 great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
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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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I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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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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We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
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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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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.
Bernard Malamud