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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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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Attention
Book
Going
Confuse
Careful
Towards
Writers
Personal

More quotes by Andre Dubus

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For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
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Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.
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I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
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Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
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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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Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
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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.
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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.
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I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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