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

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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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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.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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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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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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You see in others who you are.
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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.
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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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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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