John Gardner quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Gardner

John Gardner Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Gardner on Wise Famous Quotes.

[the writer] must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite 'I AM.

Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer.

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.

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.

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.

the world: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. .

Fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds.

It enraged me. It was their confidence, maybe - their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope.

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

Great things happen nationally when topmost leadership is goaded and supported from below.

The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.

It's a law of the universe that 87 percent of all people in all professions are incompetent.

What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?

It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.

There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.

The writer is more servant than master of his story.

All to often, on the long road up, young leaders become servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be.

A story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn't turn something

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

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.

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.

Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry

When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel

The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.

The world is all pointless accident ... I exist, nothing else.

One sign of a writer's potential is his especially sharp ear - and eye - for language.

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.

Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know

Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.

I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!

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.

The image-managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market.

Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.

Only very odd people don't realize that truth-telling is always a relative value.

The chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would not really do.

Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps overhead.

I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words
changing nothing.

It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp.

I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.

What true materialist would settle for a MacDonald's hamburger?

The world resists me and I resist the world.

The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.

Find a pile of gold and sit on it.

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.

I know what's in your mind. I know everything. That's what makes me so sick and old and tired.

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.

Heidegger's parlamblings on 'Nothing' and 'Not' and 'the Nothing that Nothings' were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy.

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.

I have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs.

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.

But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.

I wonder which one of us God finds more uninteresting.

Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign

Space hurls outwards, falconswift, mounting like an irreversible justice, a final disease

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.

He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize.

He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too.

There is some realm where feelings become birds and dark sky, and spirit is more solid than stone.

The future is as dark, as unreal, as the past.

He was saner than anyone --had fallen out of the world of illusion: love, interesting work, hope for the future.