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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
Story
Stories
Firsts
First
Drafts
Learning

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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Politics isn't in my nature.
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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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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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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
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud
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I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
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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If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
Bernard Malamud
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
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I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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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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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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
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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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We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
Bernard Malamud
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You see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
Bernard Malamud