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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

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
Drafts
Learning
Story
Stories
Firsts

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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 whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud
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Politics isn't in my nature.
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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The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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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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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You see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud