Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Firsts
Works
Drafts
First
Fiction
Enlarge
Writing
Wants
Revision
Way
Learning
Enhance
Pleasure
Exquisite
Knowledge
Pleasures
Idea
Reform
Ideas
Somewhere
More quotes by Bernard Malamud
... 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
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Bernard Malamud
You see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud
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
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
Bernard Malamud
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
I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Bernard Malamud
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
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
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud
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.
Bernard Malamud
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
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
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
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