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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

More quotes by John Dufresne

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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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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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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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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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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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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
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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.
John Dufresne
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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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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.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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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
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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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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
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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.
John Dufresne