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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
Tales
Standards
Told
Father
Thought
Bedtime
Wolves
Invented
Fairy

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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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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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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 facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.
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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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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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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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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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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 lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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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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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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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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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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