Andre Dubus Quotes - Page 2

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• I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

  Andre Dubus

  Love You, Writing, Thinking

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• Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.

  Andre Dubus

  Writing, Years, Care

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• But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

  Andre Dubus

  Book, Writing, Hatred

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• Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.

  Andre Dubus

  Writing

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• I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

  Andre Dubus

  Short Love, Believe, Stories

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.81, Open Road Media

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• I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I never would have imagined - and I look at them as if I'm the bartender in the corner of the room. They've never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder.

  Andre Dubus

  Stars, Crazy, Distance

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• I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.

  Andre Dubus

  Writing, Fog, Years

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• 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.

  Andre Dubus

  Short Love, Pain, Believe

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.81, Open Road Media

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• 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

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.19, Open Road Media

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• That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

  Andre Dubus

  Vanity, Cowardice, Source

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.51, Open Road Media

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• Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.

  Andre Dubus

  Dream, Teaching, Writing

  Source: entertainmentrealm.com

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• Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.

  Andre Dubus

  Discipline, Matter, Talent

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• I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.

  Andre Dubus

  College, Men, Wings

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• Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

  Andre Dubus

  Father, Expecting

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• After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.

  Andre Dubus

  Pain, Grief, Soul

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• For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

  Andre Dubus

  Twenties, Tonight, Useless

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.67, Open Road Media

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• I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.

  Andre Dubus

  Believe, Book, Writing

  "The Exchange: Andre Dubus III". Interview with Kate Bittman, www.newyorker.com. March 17, 2011.

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• I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.

  Andre Dubus

  Art, Believe, Who Cares

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• One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.

  Andre Dubus

  Dad, Father, Writing

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• 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.

  Andre Dubus

  Sweet, Kids, Makeup

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• I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.

  Andre Dubus

  Air, Land, Campaigns

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.33, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  Andre Dubus

  Mother, Stars, Vegetables

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• my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.

  Andre Dubus

  Philosophy, Thinking, Simple

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.61, Open Road Media

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• I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'

  Andre Dubus

  Grief, Dark, Thinking

  "The Exchange: Andre Dubus III". Interview with Kate Bittman, www.newyorker.com. March 17, 2011.

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• 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.

  Andre Dubus

  Spiritual, Men, Dancing

  Andre Dubus (2010). “The Times Are Never So Bad: A Novella and Eight Short Stories”, p.121, Open Road Media

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