John Gardner Quotes

44 quotes in 797 categories

• 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.
• The image-managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market.
• Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
• They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. 'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
• ...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…
• 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,…
• Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.
• As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the…
• 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 couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words--changing nothing.
• Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
• There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.
• 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…
• The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
• To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so…
• As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.
• i understand that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. i understood…
• I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!
• Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.
• 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…

Browse John Gardner Quotes by Category