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
Mode
Write
Live
Writing

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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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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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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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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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
Bernard Malamud
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
Bernard Malamud
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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.
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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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
Bernard Malamud
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud
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You see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud