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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.

John Dufresne

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

More quotes by John Dufresne

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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 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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The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
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Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.
John Dufresne
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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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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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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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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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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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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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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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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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
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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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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
John Dufresne