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The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.

Andre Dubus

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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Sorrow
Joy
Full
Truth
Without
Great
Life

More quotes by Andre Dubus

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I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
Andre Dubus
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It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
Andre Dubus
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One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
Andre Dubus
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I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.
Andre Dubus
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I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you're doing, you're not doing it as well as you can. Don't think about publishing, don't think about editors, don't think about marketplace.
Andre Dubus
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I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.
Andre Dubus
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Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.
Andre Dubus
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I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.
Andre Dubus
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Proportion is all and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
Andre Dubus
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I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus
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We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.
Andre Dubus
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I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I'm not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.
Andre Dubus
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For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
Andre Dubus
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My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
Andre Dubus
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I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.
Andre Dubus
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For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.
Andre Dubus
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I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
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I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.
Andre Dubus
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If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.
Andre Dubus
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I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.
Andre Dubus