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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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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Young
Littles
Iliad
Little
Effect
Writing
Effects
Always
Fiction
Would
Gone
Men
Known
World
War

More quotes by Andre Dubus

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
Andre Dubus
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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.
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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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 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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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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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
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I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
Andre Dubus
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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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