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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Fiction
Trouble
Heart
Thing
Good
Gossip

More quotes by John Dufresne

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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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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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.
John Dufresne
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
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The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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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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.
John Dufresne
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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
John Dufresne
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
John Dufresne
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne