Andre Dubus famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.
-- Andre Dubus

#Art #Jobs #Writing
Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
-- Andre Dubus

#Fear #Arms #Ghost
We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.
-- Andre Dubus

#Choices #Normal #Authenticity
I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
-- Andre Dubus

#War #Writing #Men
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
-- Andre Dubus

#Hands #Imagination #Live In The Moment
One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
-- Andre Dubus

#Writing #Life Is #Drag
The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
-- Andre Dubus

#Joy #Sorrow #Life Is
I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.
-- Andre Dubus

#Wife #Crash #Curious
As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.
-- Andre Dubus

#Philosophy #Writing #Character
Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
-- Andre Dubus

#Romance #Want #Dies
We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.
-- Andre Dubus

#Gratitude #Heart #Loss
And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.
-- Andre Dubus

#Real #Writing #Years
I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
-- Andre Dubus

#Jobs #Thinking #Life Is
What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
-- Andre Dubus

#Writing #Thinking #Discovery
There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.
-- Andre Dubus

#Beautiful #Book #Fall
I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you're doing, you're not doing it as well as you can. Don't think about publishing, don't think about editors, don't think about marketplace.
-- Andre Dubus

#Writing #Creativity #Eye
Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."
-- Andre Dubus

#Writing #Opposites #Grace
Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
-- Andre Dubus

#Sports #School #Self
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
-- Andre Dubus

#Vanity #Cowardice #Source
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
-- Andre Dubus

#Short Love #Believe #Stories
Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
-- Andre Dubus

#Discipline #Matter #Talent
As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried very hard in the writing here to be as absolutely honest as I possibly could, to not romanticize myself or my past actions or cowardly inactions in any way.
-- Andre Dubus

#Bullying #Writing #Past

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