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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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
Surprise
Worth
Writer
Reading
More quotes by Bernard Malamud
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
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
It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
Bernard Malamud
Politics isn't in my nature.
Bernard Malamud
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
Bernard Malamud
Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
Bernard Malamud
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
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
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.
Bernard Malamud
I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
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
I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Bernard Malamud
... 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
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn't work, begin something else.
Bernard Malamud
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
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud