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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Ever
Love
Selfless
Pure
Desire

More quotes by John Dufresne

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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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.
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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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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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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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Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.
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In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.
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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.
John Dufresne
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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.
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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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I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
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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 purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
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