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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
Creative
Energetic
Chance
Prose
Process
Suppose
Energy
Discover
Comes
Clean
Crafting
Ends
Beginning
Revision
Went
Edit
Open
Edits
More quotes by John Dufresne
Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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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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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.
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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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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
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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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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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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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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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne