John Dufresne Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

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.

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

Place is character. And all writing is regional.

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.

Every person in therapy has a love disorder.

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

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

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.

She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.

I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.