Quotes from Andre Dubus

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.

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

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.

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

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 read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

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

I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.

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

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

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

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

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