98 Quotes by Andre Dubus

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author – you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care – easier said than done.

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