John Dufresne Quotes & Sayings

Place is character. And all writing is regional. — John Dufresne

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done. — John Dufresne

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless? — John Dufresne

I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see if what you're saying is what you wanted to be saying. — John Dufresne

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I've loved her ever since. — John Dufresne

It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different. — John Dufresne

You can always tell a happy marriage. People in love begin to acquire each other's traits, each other's styles- they begin to look and act alike. They want to please. They admire each other and, naturally enough, want to become what they esteem and cherish. — 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

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved. — 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

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at. — John Dufresne

I learned to love stories by listening to them. — John Dufresne

Judi, a person's worth isn't measured by her utility. We're not tools. We're here to think. To feel. To be good to each other — 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. — John Dufresne

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. — John Dufresne

And life is but a dream ... Things happened in life, and you felt them, but it was all in your mind, the colors, the fear and anxiety. People surrounded you and houses did, and towns, but what you saw was not so important as what you felt. Life was one thing after another, a brief insanity, a series of inexplicable transitions that seemed at the time sensible, but at second sight ridiculous, a succession of unconnected incidents, accidental relationships. — John Dufresne

I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate ... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate. — 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

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up. — John Dufresne

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written. — John Dufresne

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place. — John Dufresne

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper. — John Dufresne

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can't live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we're distressed and go to therapy, our therapist's job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn't come with plots; it's messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can't have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense. — John Dufresne

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me. — John Dufresne

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right. — 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

Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story. — John Dufresne

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft. — John Dufresne

It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place. — John Dufresne

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves. — John Dufresne

Every person in therapy has a love disorder. — John Dufresne

I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know. - St. Augustine — John Dufresne

You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to write, so let's write. We'll chat later. Get out your pen and paper or fire up the computer. Pour yourself a coffee. Unplug the phone. Once you start, you can't stop. Give yourself a half hour. Relax. Don't think too much. You're starting a journey, and you don't know where you're going. But you do know you're going someplace you haven't been before. — John Dufresne

You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life. — John Dufresne

I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else. — 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

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

The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn't be. We are our brothers' keepers. There is right, and there is wrong. There are consequences to our actions or inactions. Disregard can be an act of violence. — John Dufresne

At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words. — John Dufresne

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety. — John Dufresne

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it. — John Dufresne

Memory is a rascal. — John Dufresne

I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did. — 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

At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble. — John Dufresne

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. — John Dufresne

I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good. — John Dufresne

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose. — 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

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

Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential. — John Dufresne

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers. — John Dufresne

I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable. — John Dufresne

Understanding is not about progress; its about process. What we may finally come to understand is that we won't,can't,understand and that incomprehension is essential to our existance. Mystery is our maker. — John Dufresne

Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doing is. — John Dufresne

She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart. — 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. — John Dufresne

As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story. — John Dufresne