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

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
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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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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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... 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.
Bernard Malamud
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
Bernard Malamud
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
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We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
Bernard Malamud
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There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
Bernard Malamud
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If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
Bernard Malamud
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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.
Bernard Malamud