Quote

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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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Time
Understand
Compel
Write
Prose
Three
Improve
Stills
Third
Still
Thirds
Book
Second
Must
Least
Writing
Times

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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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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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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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Politics isn't in my nature.
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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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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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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.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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 purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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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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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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.
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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