Quote

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.

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
Ultimately
Recaptured
Pure
Biography
Fiction
Mud
Past
Legend
Make
Biographies
Time
Clay
Life
Legends
Wholly
Exudes

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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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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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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... 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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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.
Bernard Malamud
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
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Politics isn't in my nature.
Bernard Malamud
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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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
Bernard Malamud
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If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
Bernard Malamud
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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
Bernard Malamud
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud