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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
Learned
Desire
Writing
Years
Smarter
Larger
Desires
Writer
More quotes by Andre Dubus
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
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
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.
Andre Dubus
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
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
Andre Dubus
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
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
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
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
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
I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
Andre Dubus
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
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
The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Andre Dubus
Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
Andre Dubus
I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
Andre Dubus
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
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