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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.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Wolves
Invented
Fairy
Tales
Standards
Told
Father
Thought
Bedtime

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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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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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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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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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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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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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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 act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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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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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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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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