Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Come
Motivation
Materials
Characters
Motivations
Begin
Revision
Becomes
Perceive
Imagination
Engaged
Values
Deeply
Character
Material
More quotes by 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
Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne
As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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
Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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
There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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
The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
John Dufresne
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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
Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
