Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Work
Brought
Masterful
Good
Reader
Surprisingly
Life
Gives
Accidental
Joy
Joys
Father
Readers
Tell
Lovely
Giving
Dad
Writing
Fortune

More quotes by Andre Dubus

Image
I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
Andre Dubus
Image
What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
Andre Dubus
Image
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
Image
What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Fear is a ghost embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
Andre Dubus
Image
After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.
Andre Dubus
Image
I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.
Andre Dubus
Image
I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.
Andre Dubus