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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

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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
Life
Gives
Accidental
Joy
Joys
Father
Readers
Tell
Lovely
Giving
Dad
Writing
Fortune
Work
Brought
Masterful
Good
Reader
Surprisingly

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.
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I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.
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Fear is a ghost embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
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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.
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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.
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That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
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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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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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Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
Andre Dubus
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Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
Andre Dubus
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I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.
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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 dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special he's still one of my favorite writers.
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.
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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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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