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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.
John Dufresne
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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Chance
Prose
Process
Suppose
Energy
Discover
Comes
Clean
Crafting
Ends
Beginning
Revision
Went
Edit
Open
Edits
Creative
Energetic
More quotes by John Dufresne
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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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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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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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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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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With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
John Dufresne
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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 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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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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
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
