Andre Dubus III Quotes

When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.

I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.

I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I don't want to wear my compositional tools on my sleeve.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Sometimes I write with music on, and if I'm in a good flow, I don't even hear it.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

My writing process is a mix of research, personal experiences, washing the dishes, raising kids while thinking - then writing.