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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
Look
Romantic
Firsts
Began
Notebooks
Looks
Hero
Notebook
First
Poet
Poems
Writing
Afraid
Literary
Serious
Cherish
Full
Poets
Actually
Heroes

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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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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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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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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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The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
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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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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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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your 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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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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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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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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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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