Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamudwas an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 April 1914
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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.
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.
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
We have two lives... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.
Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
Charity you can give even when you haven't got.