Top 50 Andre Dubus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.”

— Andre Dubus

2. “The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can’t have one without the other.”

— Andre Dubus

3. “It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.”

— Andre Dubus

4. “Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.”

— Andre Dubus

5. “We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

— Andre Dubus

6. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

7. “After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.”

— Andre Dubus

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

10. “I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it’s self-consciousness.”

— Andre Dubus

11. “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

12. “We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that’s normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.”

— Andre Dubus

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

15. “For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”

— Andre Dubus

16. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

17. “People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.”

— Andre Dubus

18. “What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?”

— Andre Dubus

19. “It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.”

— Andre Dubus

20. “I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I’m not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.”

— Andre Dubus

21. “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

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

— Andre Dubus

23. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

24. “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

25. “What’s so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.”

— Andre Dubus

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

— Andre Dubus

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

— Andre Dubus

28. “I’ve learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.”

— Andre Dubus

29. “I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I’ve always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.”

— Andre Dubus

30. “Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.”

— Andre Dubus

31. “Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.”

— Andre Dubus

32. “That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.”

— Andre Dubus

33. “My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I’m trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.”

— Andre Dubus

34. “Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.”

— Andre Dubus

Featured in: Romance Quotes

35. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

36. “I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.”

— Andre Dubus

37. “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.’”

— Andre Dubus

38. “Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.”

— Andre Dubus

39. “What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or – and he wished this – did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it?”

— Andre Dubus

40. “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

41. “I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.”

— Andre Dubus

42. “For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.”

— Andre Dubus

43. “Don’t outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: “We write what we don’t know we know.””

— Andre Dubus

44. “No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.”

— Andre Dubus

45. “I think the writer’s job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.”

— Andre Dubus

46. “Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.”

— Andre Dubus

47. “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.”

— Andre Dubus

48. “I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.”

— Andre Dubus

49. “One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”

— Andre Dubus

50. “I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O’Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built.”

— Andre Dubus