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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Corpses
Lovers
Dead
Sleep

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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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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.
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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.
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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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.
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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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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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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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There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
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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.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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.
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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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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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