Quote

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

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
Writers
Personal
Attention
Book
Going
Confuse
Careful
Towards

More quotes by Andre Dubus

Image
The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
Fear is a ghost embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
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
Image
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
Andre Dubus
Image
Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
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
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
Image
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
Image
I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
Image
I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.
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 think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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