Famous Quotes by Andre Dubus

“A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

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

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly.

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.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal.

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

Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children.

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

I can't talk about what I'm working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it.

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.

I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days.

Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound.

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

Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.

I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark.

I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination.

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 got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy.

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.