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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
Process
Suppose
Energy
Discover
Comes
Clean
Crafting
Ends
Beginning
Revision
Went
Edit
Open
Edits
Creative
Energetic
Chance
Prose
More quotes by John Dufresne
Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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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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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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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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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 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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With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
John Dufresne
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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There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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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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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.
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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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
The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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
