54 Quotes by John Dufresne

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don’t even know it.

Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It’s love that’s essential.

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It’s when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

It’s easier to write about a place sometimes when you’ve left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.

What you create when you’re teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It’s a place to have a conversation about a story.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you’ve made up.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip – I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer’s job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.