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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

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
Highly
Critical
Writer
Looking
Eye
Everything
Spectator
Alaska
Spectators

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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Politics isn't in my nature.
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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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.
Bernard Malamud
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The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
Bernard Malamud
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Bernard Malamud
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You see in others who you are.
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.
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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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
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
Bernard Malamud
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
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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