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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

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There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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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.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
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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.
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You see in others who you are.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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.
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Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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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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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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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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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.
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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