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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
Ends
Beginning
Revision
Went
Edit
Open
Edits
Creative
Energetic
Chance
Prose
Process
Suppose
Energy
Discover
Comes
Clean
Crafting
More quotes by John Dufresne
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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
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
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
If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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
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
I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
John Dufresne
A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
