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
Idea
Reform
Ideas
Somewhere
Firsts
Works
Drafts
First
Fiction
Enlarge
Writing
Wants
Revision
Way
Learning
Enhance
Pleasure
Exquisite
Knowledge
Pleasures

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The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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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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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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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.
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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.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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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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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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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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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.
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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Politics isn't in my nature.
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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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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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