Andre Dubus Quotes
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.
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.
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.
I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.
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.
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.
I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I'm not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.
People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.
I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.
For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.
For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.
I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.
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."
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.
The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.
Sometimes in this life, only one or two opportunities are put before us and we must seize them no matter the risk.
