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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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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Became
Sweet
Anyone
Brutalized
Natural
Frankly
Kids
Brutal
Always
Makeup
Think
Sensitive
Thinking
Violent

More quotes by 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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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'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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People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.
Andre Dubus
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As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried very hard in the writing here to be as absolutely honest as I possibly could, to not romanticize myself or my past actions or cowardly inactions in any way.
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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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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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
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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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Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
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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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 think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
Andre Dubus
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Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
Andre Dubus
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My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.
Andre Dubus
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As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.
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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Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
Andre Dubus
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One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.
Andre Dubus