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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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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Childhood
Characters
Forget
Stories
Character
Landscape
Never
Sacred
Shapes
Places

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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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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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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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