John Dufresne Quotes

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.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.

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

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

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.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

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

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.

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

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

Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.

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.

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

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.

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.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.

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

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.

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

Place is character. And all writing is regional.

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.

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

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 landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

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.

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

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.

Every person in therapy has a love disorder.

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.

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.

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.

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.