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The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Right
Draft
Written
Purpose
Firsts
First

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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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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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.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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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.
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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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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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
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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.
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.
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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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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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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