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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

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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
Write
Outline
Stories
Workshops
Writing
Outlines
Quote
Opposite
Opposites
Fiction
Grace
Paley

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.
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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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 think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
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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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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It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
Andre Dubus
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The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Andre Dubus
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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
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I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.
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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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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I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
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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
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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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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'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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Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
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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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