John Gardner Quotes
Top 65 wise famous quotes and sayings by John Gardner
John Gardner Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from John Gardner on Wise Famous Quotes.
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. .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would not really do.
I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words
changing nothing.
changing nothing.
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.
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.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
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.