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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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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Think
Bound
Thinking
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Tags
Place
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Stories
Regional
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
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
John Dufresne
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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
If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
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
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
John Dufresne
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
John Dufresne
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
With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
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
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 lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
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
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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 was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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
Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
