Quote

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.

John Dufresne

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
World
Feelings
Changed
Makes
Honest
Educates
Ends
Literature
Enhances
Stories
Understanding
Fundamentally
Persons
Reading
Educate
Person
Knowledge
Sympathy
Different
Story
Began
Love
Read
Novel

More quotes by John Dufresne

Image
Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
Image
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.
John Dufresne
Image
The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
Image
I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
John Dufresne
Image
There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
Image
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
Image
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.
John Dufresne
Image
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.
John Dufresne
Image
If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
Image
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
Image
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
Image
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.
John Dufresne
Image
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
Image
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
John Dufresne
Image
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.
John Dufresne
Image
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
Image
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
John Dufresne
Image
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
John Dufresne
Image
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
John Dufresne
Image
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.
John Dufresne