Top 100 John Gardner Quotes
#1. Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.
John Gardner
#2. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign
John Gardner
#3. Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.
John Gardner
#4. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel
John Gardner
#5. There is some realm where feelings become birds and dark sky, and spirit is more solid than stone.
John Gardner
#6. Art is as original and important as it is precisely because it does not start out with clear knowledge of what it means to say.
John Gardner
#7. What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience.
John Gardner
#8. Only very odd people don't realize that truth-telling is always a relative value.
John Gardner
#9. I should have cracked his skull mid song and sent his blood spraying out wet through the mead hall like a shocking change of key.
John Gardner
#10. It is for this reason that Aristotle recommends that the writer begin "in the middle of things" and fill in the exposition as he can. But for purposes of discussion it will be useful to treat the three components separately.
John Gardner
#11. Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.
John Gardner
#12. We know that where community exists in confers upon its members identity, a sense of belonging, and a measure of security ... Communities are the ground-level generators and preservers of values and ethical systems.
John Gardner
#13. ...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
John Gardner
#14. Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.
John Gardner
#15. Yes! Clumly had thought. There it was. Whatever it meant, spiritualistic trash for old ladies or the roaring secret of life and death, for a minute there Clumly had believed he wanted to know.
John Gardner
#17. the world: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. .
John Gardner
#18. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party ... Art ... is less like a cocktail party thank a tank of shark.
John Gardner
#19. Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps overhead.
John Gardner
#20. It's a law of the universe that 87 percent of all people in all professions are incompetent.
John Gardner
#21. One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.
John Gardner
#22. People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
John Gardner
#23. It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.
John Gardner
#24. Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind.
John Gardner
#25. Theme is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it- initially an intuitive but finally an intellectual act on the part of a writer.
John Gardner
#26. Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
John Gardner
#27. In the town, children go down on their backs in the drifted snow and move their arms and, when they rise, leave behind them impressions, mysterious and ominous, of winged creatures.
John Gardner
#28. The writer is more servant than master of his story.
John Gardner
#29. There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.
John Gardner
#30. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence of any thing is infinite.
John Gardner
#31. Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.
John Gardner
#32. The world is all pointless accident ... I exist, nothing else.
John Gardner
#33. The more often one finds the magic key, whatever it is, the more easily the soul's groping fingers come to land on it. In magic as in other things, success brings success.
John Gardner
#34. The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.
John Gardner
#35. I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of
serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive.
John Gardner
#36. The future is as dark, as unreal, as the past.
John Gardner
#37. It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp.
John Gardner
#38. Great things happen nationally when topmost leadership is goaded and supported from below.
John Gardner
#39. A story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn't turn something
John Gardner
#40. When I was a child I truly loved:
Unthinking love as calm and deep
As the North Sea. But I have lived,
And now I do not sleep.
John Gardner
#41. I know what's in your mind. I know everything. That's what makes me so sick and old and tired.
John Gardner
#42. I have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs.
John Gardner
#43. What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?
John Gardner
#44. It enraged me. It was their confidence, maybe - their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope.
John Gardner
#45. Gilgamesh said to him, to Utnapishtim the remote,
What can I do, Utnapishtim? Where can I go?
A thief has stolen my flesh.
Death lives in the house where my bed is,
and wherever I set my feet, there Death is.
John Gardner
#46. [the writer] must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite 'I AM.
John Gardner
#47. A profound theme is of trifling importance if the characters knocked around by it are uninteresting, and brilliant technique is a nuisance if it pointlessly prevents us from seeing the characters and what they do.
John Gardner
#48. Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.
John Gardner
#49. Fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds.
John Gardner
#50. Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
John Gardner
#51. Ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that.
John Gardner
#52. It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.
John Gardner
#53. He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize.
John Gardner
#54. To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought - become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.
John Gardner
#55. I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!
John Gardner
#56. The world resists me and I resist the world.
John Gardner
#57. All to often, on the long road up, young leaders become servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be.
John Gardner
#58. The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers.
John Gardner
#59. Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry
John Gardner
#60. As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.
John Gardner
#61. The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.
John Gardner
#62. Where the realist would say, "One day Gregor Samsa woke up to the realization that he was like a cockroach," the expressionist heightens or intensifies reality by turning the metaphor to fact.
John Gardner
#63. Do you think it possible for a woman to love two men at the same time?' 'A man can love two women, so I see no problem.
John Gardner
#64. The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.
John Gardner
#65. The chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would not really do.
John Gardner
#66. He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot ...
John Gardner
#67. So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
John Gardner
#68. They only think they think. No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spiderwebs. But they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that!
John Gardner
#69. I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words
changing nothing.
John Gardner
#70. When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.
John Gardner
#71. What true materialist would settle for a MacDonald's hamburger?
John Gardner
#72. We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
John Gardner
#73. I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.
John Gardner
#74. The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.
John Gardner
#75. The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.
John Gardner
#76. Space hurls outwards, falconswift, mounting like an irreversible justice, a final disease
John Gardner
#77. Tedium is the worst pain. the mind lays out the world in blocks, and the hushed blood waits for revenge. all order, i've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal - a harmless sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world - two snake pits.
John Gardner
#78. Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king's grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist.
John Gardner
#79. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer.
John Gardner
#80. My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.
John Gardner
#81. One of the things that should go into the writer's notebook is a set of experiments with the sentence. A convenient and challenging place to begin is with the long sentence, one that runs to at least two pages.
John Gardner
#82. In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
John Gardner
#83. Heidegger's parlamblings on 'Nothing' and 'Not' and 'the Nothing that Nothings' were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy.
John Gardner
#84. The image-managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market.
John Gardner
#85. Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists only so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.
John Gardner
#86. Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.
John Gardner
#87. He was saner than anyone --had fallen out of the world of illusion: love, interesting work, hope for the future.
John Gardner
#88. Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
John Gardner
#89. Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.
John Gardner
#90. One sign of a writer's potential is his especially sharp ear - and eye - for language.
John Gardner
#91. I wonder which one of us God finds more uninteresting.
John Gardner
#92. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.
John Gardner
#93. The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
John Gardner
#94. As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night.
John Gardner
#95. He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too.
John Gardner
#96. Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know
John Gardner
#97. That is their happiness: they see all life without observing it. They're buried in it like crabs in mud. Except men, of course. I am not in a mood, just yet, to talk of men.
John Gardner
#98. The trick, of course, is to find a profession you like and one that will also feed your writing, and not eat up all your time.
John Gardner
#99. By the time you've run your mind through it a hundred times, relentlessly worked out every tic of terror, it's lost its power over you ... [Soon it's] a story on a page or, more precisely, everybody's story on a page.
John Gardner
#100. One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time.
John Gardner
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