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

Categorized in : Thinking Discovery Writing

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

writing jobs art

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

Andre Dubus

arms ghost fear

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

authenticity normal choices

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

desire writing years

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

drag life-is writing

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

curious crash wife

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

writing character philosophy

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

Andre Dubus

real writing years

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

gratitude loss heart

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

black-and-white dream writing

I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.

Andre Dubus

life-is jobs thinking

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

beautiful book fall

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 wings men

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

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.

Andre Dubus

imagination live-in-the-moment hands

Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.

Andre Dubus

romance dies want

The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.

Andre Dubus

sorrow life-is joy

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

Andre Dubus

writing

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

Andre Dubus

creativity writing thinking

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

grace opposites writing