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

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Begin
Revision
Becomes
Perceive
Imagination
Engaged
Values
Deeply
Character
Material
Come
Motivation
Materials
Characters
Motivations

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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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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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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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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 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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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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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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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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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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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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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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