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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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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Thinking
People
Gossip
Fiction
Nothing
Made
Think
More quotes by John Dufresne
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
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
John Dufresne
Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
John Dufresne
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.
John Dufresne
I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
John Dufresne
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
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
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
John Dufresne
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
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
A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
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
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
John Dufresne