Quote

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

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
Live
Writing
Mode
Write

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
Bernard Malamud
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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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If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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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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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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
Bernard Malamud
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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.
Bernard Malamud