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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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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Firsts
Began
Notebooks
Looks
Hero
Notebook
First
Poet
Poems
Writing
Afraid
Literary
Serious
Cherish
Full
Poets
Actually
Heroes
Look
Romantic

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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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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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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.
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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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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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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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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 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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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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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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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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