Andre Dubus III

“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.”

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

“I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.”

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

“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.”

“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. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer; I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special; he's still one of my favorite writers.”

“Sometimes in this life, only one or two opportunities are put before us and we must seize them no matter the risk.”

“I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.”

“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.”

“I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.”

“I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about 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. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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