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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Begins
Senses
Fiction
Place
Work
More quotes by 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
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
The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
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.
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
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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 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
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 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
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
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 grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
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
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
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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
Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
