John Dufresne Quotes

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

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.

I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know. - St. Augustine

Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story.

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.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.

I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate ... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate.

You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life.

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.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

Place is character. And all writing is regional.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.

Judi, a person's worth isn't measured by her utility. We're not tools. We're here to think. To feel. To be good to each other

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

Understanding is not about progress; its about process. What we may finally come to understand is that we won't,can't,understand and that incomprehension is essential to our existance. Mystery is our maker.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

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.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to write, so let's write. We'll chat later. Get out your pen and paper or fire up the computer. Pour yourself a coffee. Unplug the phone. Once you start, you can't stop. Give yourself a half hour. Relax. Don't think too much. You're starting a journey, and you don't know where you're going. But you do know you're going someplace you haven't been before.

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I've loved her ever since.

And life is but a dream ... Things happened in life, and you felt them, but it was all in your mind, the colors, the fear and anxiety. People surrounded you and houses did, and towns, but what you saw was not so important as what you felt. Life was one thing after another, a brief insanity, a series of inexplicable transitions that seemed at the time sensible, but at second sight ridiculous, a succession of unconnected incidents, accidental relationships.

At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.

As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.

I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did.

You can always tell a happy marriage. People in love begin to acquire each other's traits, each other's styles- they begin to look and act alike. They want to please. They admire each other and, naturally enough, want to become what they esteem and cherish.

Memory is a rascal.

The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn't be. We are our brothers' keepers. There is right, and there is wrong. There are consequences to our actions or inactions. Disregard can be an act of violence.

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.

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

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.