Top 76 Andre Dubus Quotes
#1. 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 III
#2. That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
#3. Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don't write at all.
Andre Dubus III
#4. 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 III
#5. My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.
Andre Dubus
#6. What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
Andre Dubus
#7. On my way out with the rest, I glanced back at Bowman. he was on this knees, his hair in his face, his nose and split lips dripping with blood. He was staring down at the floor like he'd been waiting for this and now it had finally happened; he look relieved.
Andre Dubus III
#8. It's almost easier being down and alone than when you re up and no one s there to share the view with you
Andre Dubus III
#9. 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.
Andre Dubus III
#10. 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
#11. If there is no snake at your feet, do not lift rocks at the side of the road.
Andre Dubus III
#12. 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 III
#13. Its sound in her soul was a distant fast train. Love did not bring happiness, it did not last, and it ended in pain. She did not want to believe this, and she was not certain that she did; perhaps she feared it was true in her own life, and her fear had become a feeling that tasted like disbelief.
Andre Dubus
#14. This I know of life's difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.
Andre Dubus III
#15. 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."
Andre Dubus
#16. 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.
Andre Dubus III
#18. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
Andre Dubus
#19. 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.
Andre Dubus
#20. There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel - it's that postmodern thing - it's more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being's experience.
Andre Dubus III
#21. 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.
Andre Dubus
#22. I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic exploration of that subject. All you can do is let it go
Andre Dubus
#23. He tried to remember her ever being this way before. In her voice
almost overexuberant
was not simply holiday cheer but joyous relief, like some terminally ill patient who's just been told she's not sick anymore.
Andre Dubus III
#24. Lester wanted to rise up out of this like a cloud, to drift over the valley and shore to the Pacific, to dissolve into its huge green expanse like rain.
Andre Dubus III
#25. 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
#26. 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.
Andre Dubus
#27. 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 III
#28. Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you'll see in your arms is yourself.
Andre Dubus
#29. He learned how quickly love died when you weren't looking; if you weren't looking.
Andre Dubus
#30. We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.
Andre Dubus
#31. 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
#32. 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 III
#34. 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.
Andre Dubus
#35. I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus III
#36. Beach houses along short sandy streets. He can feel her bare forarm brushing his, and it's strange she's being so quiet. He glances down at her and she smiles up at him as if, in his silence, he's been telling a long story and she is simply listening to it.
Andre Dubus III
#37. Can't make marriage the be-all and end-all. Because if you do it won't work. Listen: from the looks of things we've got one of the few solid marriages around. But it took work, pussycat. Work.' Her eyes gleamed with the victory of that work, the necessity for it.
Andre Dubus
#38. 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
#39. 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 III
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Andre Dubus III
#42. I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O'Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built.
Andre Dubus
#43. Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
Andre Dubus III
#44. 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
#45. 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.
Andre Dubus
#46. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
Andre Dubus
#47. It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
Andre Dubus
#48. I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
Andre Dubus
#49. No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.
Andre Dubus
#50. I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
Andre Dubus
#52. Pop," I said, "isn't this shit vaulable?"
"Not to me, son.
Andre Dubus III
#53. Sometimes in this life, only one or two opportunities are put before us and we must seize them no matter the risk.
Andre Dubus III
#54. The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Andre Dubus III
#55. What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or - and he wished this - did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it?
Andre Dubus
#56. We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got.
Andre Dubus
#57. Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
Andre Dubus
#58. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.
Andre Dubus
#59. Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.
Andre Dubus
#61. 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.
Andre Dubus
#62. And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.
Andre Dubus III
#63. 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 III
#64. I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
Andre Dubus
#65. 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.
Andre Dubus III
#66. I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.
Andre Dubus III
#67. I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
Andre Dubus
#68. Joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)
Andre Dubus III
#69. I felt joined to all the men and women across cultures down through the ages who'd done something useful with their hands, who'd made essential things from whatever was in front of them.
Ann Hood
#70. Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
Andre Dubus
#71. She was speaking again, her voice like the chirp of a bird who has flown into a black tunnel but does not yet know it.
Andre Dubus III
#72. Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
Andre Dubus III
#73. Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Andre Dubus III
#74. Soraya-joon, I have done all that I could. Do not be sorry for us. Your mother and I await you upon your return. We love you more than we have loved life. After your dear brother name your first son. Live here if you like, but if you sell it take no less than one hundred thousand dollars. ~Bawbaw
Andre Dubus III
#75. It seemed almost inconceivable that in his short marriage to Althea she had, in her quiet way, left him feeling not only worthy, but exceptional, a man not only capable of being a real poet, but a husband and father too.
Andre Dubus III
#76. 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.
Andre Dubus III
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