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

I've always had fond memories of cooking Thanksgiving. — Wylie Dufresne

I've seen cookbooks from lots of great chefs that have been disappointing. A book, to me, it has to have a story. Some of these people, they open a restaurant, and one year later, there's a cookbook. There's not much of a story yet. — Wylie Dufresne

The spirit of pickling is one of adventure and fun. — Wylie Dufresne

Whatever loss, pain or tragedy you have experienced, you can get through. — Aimee 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

'Top Chef' is always entertaining - it's hard to stop watching, like a good hockey fight, but no one gets hurt. It's great that the format is so inherently dramatic and can make cooking so entertaining to people who might not ordinarily be interested in a cooking show. Good for the industry all round. — Wylie 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 don't like the term 'dinner as theater,' because that implies something thespian that I don't want to tie into this, but there are plenty of times that people go out to dinner because they want to have an experience. There are, however, probably many more times that people go out to eat because it's 7 o'clock and it's time to eat. — Wylie 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

The East Village is where I cut my teeth as a kid. I ran around here on a skateboard. — Wylie Dufresne

I was working for a chef a long time ago who told me to not skip steps or be in a hurry. Success in a kitchen is more like a marathon and less like a sprint. Rising up the ranks too quickly isn't necessarily a good thing. This advice was from a guy who was sorry he had done that and didn't want me to do the same. — Wylie Dufresne

I should be scared, but I am far too excited to let in any fear. — Aimee DuFresne

I think I can poach a pretty mean egg the old-fashioned way. — Wylie Dufresne

We have a funny sort of love/hate relationship with critics because, unfortunately, in the art/commerce dance that we do, they drive people to the restaurant. Regardless of sometimes how well we prepare the food, if people don't know that we're out there, if someone isn't talking about us, you guys aren't coming. — Wylie Dufresne

The most important thing with turkey is to let it rest - most people don't let it rest long enough. It will get juicier the longer you let it rest. — Wylie Dufresne

Okay, a lot of people think that I'm someone known for a love of eggs and egg cookery. Being asked to endorse an egg yolk separator, I mean, I understood where it came from, but it didn't seem necessarily like something that was ultimately worth pursuing. — Wylie 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

My mother made the best scrambled eggs, super-loose and soft. — Wylie Dufresne

Fish butchering means a lot to me as a chef; I take pride in it and get a lot of joy from filleting fish, working with fish, breaking down fish, trying to understand fish. — Wylie Dufresne

I have strong feelings about cookbooks because I am a lover of them and student of them and devourer of them and collect them. I find them to be a great source of inspiration. When I was a cook and not making much money, I always used to spend most of what I had on cookbooks. — Wylie Dufresne

I really don't do much on the night of Thanksgiving other than bring the wine and carve the turkey. My contribution comes the day after, in the form of breakfast. I usually just forage through the leftovers for things that will go well with eggs. — Wylie 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

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

Dufresne, his name was - I remember, because it sounds a little like mine. It seems he was not so smart at wife-killing as he was at picking growth stocks. — Stephen King

I can fry hollandaise, I can fry ketchup, I can fry mustard. — Wylie Dufresne

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

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

Mom always said that confidence is a great leadership tool. — Jerilyn Dufresne

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

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me. — 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 think it's important for anyone who is artistic to look back on their body of work and be critical. Maybe the Beatles can look back and say everything was perfect, but we've come up with hundreds and hundreds of dishes, and anyone who is honest with themselves has to realize that every single one wasn't an absolute, unequivocal home run. — Wylie Dufresne

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

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

Not having a New York culinary tradition, far from being limiting, it's an opportunity to create freely. — Wylie Dufresne

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

It turns out that life in the kitchen is very similar to life on a team. Sports and kitchens are about teams. I found my alternate team sport in the kitchen. — Wylie 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

Eggs are one of my all-time favorite foods, and making the over-easy egg is a test of skill. — Wylie Dufresne

I like all cheese, but my guiltiest pleasure is definitely American cheese. — Wylie 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

I would like to, at some point, do a cookbook. — Wylie Dufresne

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

There will never be a right or wrong way to cook something, but there will always be a more informed way. — Wylie Dufresne

It was then that I had a choice. I could cry and lay down and die, or I could use what I had learned from him to keep going and fully live. — Aimee 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

When ramps are in season, we pickle a bunch of ramps and fold that into soup. Pickled pearl onions are great chopped up or pureed. — Wylie Dufresne

Andy Dufresne: 'That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you ... haven't you ever felt that way about music?'
Red: 'I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.'
Andy: 'Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.'
Red: 'Forget?'
Andy: 'Forget that ... there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside ... that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.'
Red: 'What're you talking about?'
Andy: 'Hope. — Stephen King

Whites cook at a lower temperature, set at a lower temperature than yolks. That, to me, is very interesting. That has opened up - as an egg lover, that has opened up sort of a world of possibilities, of applications. — Wylie Dufresne

I present classics in an unfamiliar way or unfamiliar ingredients and preparations in a classical way. — Wylie Dufresne

Eggs Benedict is genius. It's eggs covered in eggs. I mean, come on,
that person should be the president. — Wylie Dufresne

I don't think of eggs as being fundamental to the flavor of mayonnaise, but they are to Hollandaise. — Wylie Dufresne

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

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

It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge. — Wylie Dufresne

Memory is a rascal. — 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

Neighborhoods change. In some ways, it's part of the beauty of New York City. It's in a constant state of flux. — Wylie Dufresne

Every dish doesn't have to be showy, and every dish doesn't have to slap you in the face with technique. — Wylie Dufresne

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

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

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

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

It's been a struggle to get people to come eat for fun. You know, the way they listen to music. You can do all kinds of things with music. But food - it's something people need, and that changes everything. You start playing with it, people have all sorts of reactions. — Wylie 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 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

It's a funny thing, but it's often overlooked that I'm a huge devout lover of French cooking. I have the utmost respect for them, though they have lost their respect for me because they think the way I cook is nutty. — Wylie Dufresne

People have been manipulating food ever since they realized cooking a whole animal was difficult. Cows don't come in hot dog form. — Wylie Dufresne

I've been asked to endorse lots of different pieces of equipment. It's not necessarily that it's an awful thing to be asked to endorse something, because it's inherently a compliment to your skills, your abilities, on a level. But sometimes it's just not the right fit. — Wylie 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

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

Whether it be cereal technology or candy technology or snack technology, puff snacks, I'm always curious to know how those things are made and how we can take that technology, those ingredients, and apply it to a stand-alone restaurant. — Wylie Dufresne

I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry. — Wylie Dufresne

Hollandaise, I would like to pour over my head and just rub all over myself. Eggs Benedict is genius. It's eggs covered in eggs. — Wylie Dufresne

The first chess book that I read was Dufresne's self-tutor, published with Lasker's Common Sense in Chess as an appendix. — Vasily Smyslov

Extremely ripe things are not ideal for pickling. If you pour a hot liquid over super ripe strawberries, you're going to have strawberry soup. — Wylie Dufresne

We have fried things in cubes, historically. We tried bars of Hollandaise, we tried different shapes, but it ultimately seemed like the cube was the right shape. — Wylie Dufresne

There's nobody you can call and say, 'So, can you maybe send me your formula for frying Hollandaise?' because to the best of my knowledge, it didn't exist before we did it. — Wylie 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

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

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

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

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

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word. — 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

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

As a pure source of reference, 'Modernist Cuisine' is incredibly helpful. It's like a modern-day encyclopedia, except for a single subject. It's not always the answer, but it's always a starting point. I feel honored to have been able to contribute to it. — Wylie Dufresne