Quote

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

John Dufresne

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by John Dufresne

Image
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.
John Dufresne
Image
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
Image
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
John Dufresne
Image
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
Image
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
Image
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
Image
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
Image
If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
Image
A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
Image
I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
John Dufresne
Image
Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
Image
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
Image
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
John Dufresne
Image
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne