I truly believe the art’s larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
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. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you’re doing, you’re not doing it as well as you can. Don’t think about publishing, don’t think about editors, don’t think about marketplace. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
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. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. 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. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
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. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
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 and crazy stuff I never would have imagined – and I look at them as if I’m the bartender in the corner of the room. They’ve never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder. Andre Dubus III Read Quote
