Literary Birthday – 11 August – Andre Dubus II

Andre Dubus II was born 11 August 1936, and died 24 February 1999.

Quotes

1. 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.
2. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
3. It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
4. 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.
5. Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.
6. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
7. Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
8. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul.
9. My imagination gave me a dual life: I lived in my body, and at the same time lived a life no one could see.

Andre Dubus II was an American short story writer. He has been hailed as one of the best American short story writers of the twentieth century. He is the author of Selected Stories and Meditations from a Movable Chair.

Source for Image

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by Amanda Patterson

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