John Gardner Quotes
44 quotes
in 797 categories
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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.
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The image-managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market.
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Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
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They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. 'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
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...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…
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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,…
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Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.
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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…
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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.
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I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words--changing nothing.
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Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
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There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.
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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…
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The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
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To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so…
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As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.
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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…
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I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!
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Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.
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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…
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