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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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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Around
Close
Fifteen
Stills
Writer
Favorite
Still
Wasn
Ten
Live
Special
Dad
Writing
Start
Mom
Kind
Though
Aware
Weekly
Really
Reading
Writers
Occurred
Didn
Saws
Divorced

More quotes by 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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We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.
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 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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It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
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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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.
Andre Dubus
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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
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I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
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 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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There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.
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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That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
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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What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
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 wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
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