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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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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Something
Ultimately
Stay
Teach
Important
Great
Writing
Thing

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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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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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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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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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
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A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
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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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It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
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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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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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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