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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

Image
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
Image
We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Politics isn't in my nature.
Bernard Malamud
Image
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
Image
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
Bernard Malamud
Image
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud
Image
When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
Bernard Malamud
Image
I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
Image
There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
Image
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud