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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.

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
Character
View
Ever
Views
Matter
Goes
Writing
Philosophy
Trying
Story
Point
Write
Stories
Plot

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Andre Dubus
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It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
Andre Dubus
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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.
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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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 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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Proportion is all and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
Andre Dubus
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I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
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One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.
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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People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.
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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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