Quote

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

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
Literature
Tonight
Knowledge
Twenty
Useless
Twenties
Hungry
Million
Freezing
Americans
Astronomy
Millions
Homeless

More quotes by Andre Dubus

Image
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
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
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
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
Image
Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.
Andre Dubus
Image
Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
Andre Dubus
Image
I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
Andre Dubus
Image
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.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
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
Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
Andre Dubus
Image
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.
Andre Dubus
Image
I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
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
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
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.
Andre Dubus
Image
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.
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
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