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

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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... it's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
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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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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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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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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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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Politics isn't in my nature.
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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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If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
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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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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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We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Bernard Malamud
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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.
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