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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Luxury
Essential
Essentials
Pleasure
Love

More quotes by John Dufresne

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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.
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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.
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Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.
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Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
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With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
John Dufresne
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The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.
John Dufresne
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
John Dufresne
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The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.
John Dufresne
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne