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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
Drafts
Learning
Story
Stories
Firsts
First

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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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If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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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.
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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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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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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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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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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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There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
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