98 Quotes by Andre Dubus

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father.

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.

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.’

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.

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.