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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.

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
Larger
Desires
Writer
Learned
Desire
Writing
Years
Smarter

More quotes by Andre Dubus

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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.
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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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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I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
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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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 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
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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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Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
Andre Dubus
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Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
Andre Dubus
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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
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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.
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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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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That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
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I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'
Andre Dubus
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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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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
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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