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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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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Writing
Memoir
Every
Drag
Things
Reader
Life
Worth
Learned
Human
Everything
Humans
Memoirs

More quotes by 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 was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.
Andre Dubus
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I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic exploration of that subject. All you can do is let it go
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 read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
Andre Dubus
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Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
Andre Dubus
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That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
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I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I never would have imagined - and I look at them as if I'm the bartender in the corner of the room. They've never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder.
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 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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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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Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.
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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Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: We write what we don't know we know.
Andre Dubus
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I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
Andre Dubus
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I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.
Andre Dubus
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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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Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
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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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