Top 100 John Gardner Quotes
#1. It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?
Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.
James C. Collins
#2. In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I've never forgotten: Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay.
Gretchen Rubin
#3. We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor
#4. In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.
Ann Leckie
#5. 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
#6. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign
John Gardner
#7. 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
#9. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel
John Gardner
#10. There is some realm where feelings become birds and dark sky, and spirit is more solid than stone.
John Gardner
#11. 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
#12. History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner
#13. 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
#14. Only very odd people don't realize that truth-telling is always a relative value.
John Gardner
#15. They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
John Gardner
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.
John Gardner
#19. 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
#20. ...{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
#21. Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
John W. Gardner
#22. 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
#23. Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
John W. Gardner
#24. All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.
John W. Gardner
#25. 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
#27. the world: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. .
John Gardner
#28. In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual's social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.
John W. Gardner
#29. Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.
John W. Gardner
#30. 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
#31. Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps overhead.
John Gardner
#32. It's a law of the universe that 87 percent of all people in all professions are incompetent.
John Gardner
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.
John Gardner
#37. Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind.
John Gardner
#38. 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
#39. Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
John Gardner
#40. One man interacting creatively with others can move the world.
John W. Gardner
#41. 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
#42. We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.
John W. Gardner
#43. The writer is more servant than master of his story.
John Gardner
#44. Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
John W. Gardner
#45. There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.
John Gardner
#46. It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
John W. Gardner
#47. For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.
John W. Gardner
#51. The world is all pointless accident ... I exist, nothing else.
John Gardner
#52. Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.
John W. Gardner
#53. 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
#54. The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.
John Gardner
#55. 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
#56. The future is as dark, as unreal, as the past.
John Gardner
#57. It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp.
John Gardner
#58. True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
#59. All that we know about the interaction between leaders and constituents or followers tells us that communication and influence flow in both directions; and in that two-way communication, nonrational, nonverbal, and unconscious elements play their part.
John W. Gardner
#60. The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
John W. Gardner
#61. Leaders develop their styles as they interact with their constituencies. They move toward the style that seems most effective in dealing with the mixture of elements that make up their constituencies.
John W. Gardner
#62. One exemplary act may affect one life, or even millions of lives. All those who set standards for themselves, who strengthen the bonds of community, who do their work creditably and accept individual responsibility, are building the common future.
John W. Gardner
#63. Great things happen nationally when topmost leadership is goaded and supported from below.
John Gardner
#64. A story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn't turn something
John Gardner
#65. 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
#66. Perhaps the most striking feature of the [nonprofit] sector is its relative freedom from constraints and its resulting pluralism.
John W. Gardner
#67. I know what's in your mind. I know everything. That's what makes me so sick and old and tired.
John Gardner
#68. I have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs.
John Gardner
#69. Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
#70. What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?
John Gardner
#71. It enraged me. It was their confidence, maybe - their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope.
John Gardner
#72. The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.
John W. Gardner
#73. I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
John W. Gardner
#74. The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
John W. Gardner
#75. 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
#76. [the writer] must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite 'I AM.
John Gardner
#77. 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
#78. Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.
John Gardner
#79. Fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds.
John Gardner
#80. Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
John Gardner
#81. 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
#82. Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.
John W. Gardner
#83. The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
John W. Gardner
#84. The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.
John W. Gardner
#85. 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
#86. Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.
John W. Gardner
#87. 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
#88. Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
John W. Gardner
#89. 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
#90. The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner
#91. I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!
John Gardner
#92. The world resists me and I resist the world.
John Gardner
#93. The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.
John W. Gardner
#94. There's no shame," John Barton said quietly. "Funerals are the place for letting it out. They're the last free-for-all in our society. Without them we would all turn to stone from unexpressed emotion.
Scot Gardner
#95. All to often, on the long road up, young leaders become servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be.
John Gardner
#96. 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
#97. It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner
#98. Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry
John Gardner
#99. When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John W. Gardner
#100. Americans have always believed that-within the law-all kinds of people should be allowed to take the initiative in all kinds of activities. And out of that pluralism has come virtually all of our creativity. Freedom is real only to the extent that there are diverse alternatives.
John W. Gardner
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