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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
Fairy
Tales
Standards
Told
Father
Thought
Bedtime
Wolves
Invented

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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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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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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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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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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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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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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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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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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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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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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