Come Understand Quotes by John Dufresne

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…

— John Dufresne

“At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's…

— John Dufresne

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

— John Dufresne

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

— John Dufresne

You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these…

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

— John Dufresne

“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”

— John Dufresne

“I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see…

— John Dufresne

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

— John Dufresne

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene…

— John Dufresne

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

— John Dufresne

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.

— John Dufresne

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…

— John Dufresne