John Dufresne Quotes

“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

“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

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

— John Dufresne

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

— 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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

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

— 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

“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

“Memory is a rascal.”

— 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 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

“Every person in therapy has a love disorder.”

— John Dufresne

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

— 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

“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

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

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

“I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know. -St. Augustine”

— 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

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

— John Dufresne

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

— 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 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

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

— John Dufresne

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

— 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

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

— John Dufresne

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

— John Dufresne

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

— 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

“Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.”

— 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

“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

“I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.”

— 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

“We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.”

— John Dufresne

“Place is character. And all writing is regional.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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 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

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

— 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