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
Stills
Third
Still
Thirds
Book
Second
Must
Least
Writing
Times
Time
Understand
Compel
Write
Prose
Three
Improve

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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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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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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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Politics isn't in my nature.
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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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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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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
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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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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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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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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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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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