Literary Birthday – 11 September – Andre Dubus III

Happy Birthday, Andre Dubus III, born on 11 September 1959.

Andre Dubus III Quotes

1. The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can’t have one without the other.
2. I’m one of those writers who can’t talk about what they’re working on. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
3. 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.
4. There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel – it’s that postmodern thing – it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.
5. 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. I can’t tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father’s work was masterful.
6. If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career.
7. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author – you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care – easier said than done.
8. Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.
9. When you finish a draft of a poem, or short story or novel, you make sure you go out and celebrate all night long because whether the world ever notices or not, whether you get it published or not, you did something most people never do: You started, stuck with, and finished a creative work. And that is a triumph.
10. One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything.

Andre Dubus III is an American novelist and short story writer. His nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, was published in 2024. His books are published in over twenty-five languages. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he is a full-time faculty member. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His father was the writer, Andre Dubus II.

Source for Image: Author’s website

by Amanda Patterson
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