44+ John Dufresne Quotes On Education, Bible And Humorous

John Dufresne is an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his novels The Way That Water Enters Stone and Louisiana Power & Light. He has also published several collections of short stories, including Requiem, Mass and I Don't Like Where This Is Going. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Dufresne on leadership, life, education.

Top 10 John Dufresne Quotes

1. I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
2. 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.
3. Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.
4. A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
5. As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
6. I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.
7. 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.
8. Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
9. We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
10. If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

John Dufresne Short Quotes

• Place is character. And all writing is regional.
• I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
• I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
• A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
• The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
• At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.

John Dufresne Quotes About Love

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

Every person in therapy has a love disorder. — 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 learned to love stories by listening to them. — John Dufresne

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

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

John Dufresne Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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 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

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

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft. — John Dufresne

Life Lessons by John Dufresne

1. John Dufresne emphasizes the importance of creativity and imagination in writing, encouraging readers to explore the power of language and storytelling.
2. He also stresses the importance of taking risks and pushing boundaries when writing, as well as the need to be open to feedback and criticism.
3. Finally, Dufresne encourages writers to be persistent and resilient in their work, and to never give up in the face of adversity.