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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.
John Dufresne
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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Mines
Mine
However
Emotional
Events
Fiction
Facts
Unimportant
Life
Experiences
More quotes by John Dufresne
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
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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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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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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
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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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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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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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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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
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.
John Dufresne
