John Gardner (American writer) Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

John Gardner
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
I really do believe that a novel has to be a feast of the senses, a delightful thing.

John Gardner
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
The Lizard is a timid thing That cannot dance or fly or sing; He hunts for bugs beneath the floor And longs to be a dinosaur.

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

John Gardner
Always be kind to animals, Morning, noon, and night; For animals have feelings too, And furthermore, they bite.

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

John Gardner
Along with the peasant in the novelist, there must be a man with a whip. Drivenness is trouble for both the novelist and his friends, but no novelist, I think, can succeed without it.

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

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

John Gardner
For a true novel there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking.

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

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

John Gardner
Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly what is there.

John Gardner
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

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

John Gardner
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
Good fiction sets off…a vivid and continuous dream in the reader's mind.

John Gardner
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
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