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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Right
Always
Never
Love
Surprise

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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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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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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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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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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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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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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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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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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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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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The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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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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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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