John Dufresne Quotes
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Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.
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Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.
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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.
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I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.
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With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
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Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doing is.
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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.
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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.
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You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.
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You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these obstacles is to write your way through them. And writing always works.
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I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
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I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
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Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.
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I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.
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In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.
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I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did.
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There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
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It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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