Quote

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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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
First
Fiction
Enlarge
Writing
Wants
Revision
Learning
Enhance
Way
Pleasure
Exquisite
Knowledge
Pleasures
Idea
Reform
Ideas
Somewhere
Firsts
Works
Drafts

More quotes by 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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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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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... 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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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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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
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There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
Bernard Malamud
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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.'
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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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.
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
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud