John Dufresne Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Every person in therapy has a love disorder.

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

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

You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these obstacles is to write your way through them. And writing always works.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

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

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.