John Gardner Quotes & Sayings

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

The world resists me and I resist the world. — John Gardner

It is the importance of this quality of generosity in fiction that requires a measure of childishness in the writer. People who have strong mental focus and a sense of purpose in their lives, people who have respect for all that grownups generally respect (earning a good living, the flag, the school system, those who are richer than oneself, those who are beloved and famous, such as movie stars), are unlikely ever to make it through the many revisions it takes to tell a story beautifully, without visible tricks, nor would they be able to tolerate the fame and fortune of those who tell stories stupidly, with hundreds of tricks, all of them old and boring to the discriminating mind. First, with his stubborn churlishness the good writer scoffs at what the grownups are praising, then, with his childish forgetfulness and indifference to what sensible people think, he goes back to his foolish pastime, the making of real art. — 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 people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers. — John Gardner

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

True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests valyes and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action. — John Gardner

No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others. (Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners.) — John Gardner

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. — John Gardner

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

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

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

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

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. — John Gardner

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

Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. — John Gardner

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

I am mad with joy.
At least I think it's joy. Strangers have come, and it's a whole new game. I kiss the ice on the frozen creeks, I press my ear to it, honoring the water that rattles below, for by water they came: the icebergs parted as if gently pushed back by enormous hands, and the ship sailed through, sea-eager, foamy-necked, white sails, riding the swan-road, flying like a bird! O happy Grendel! Fifteen glorious heroes, proud in their battle dress, fat as cows! — 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

Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king's grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist. — John Gardner

Though we run across exceptions, philosophical novels where explanation holds interest, the temptation to explain is one that should almost always be resisted. A good writer can get anything at all across through action and dialogue, and if he can think of no powerful reason to do otherwise, he should probably leave explanation to his reviewers and critics. The writer should especially avoid comment on what his characters are feeling, or at very least should be sure he understands the common objection summed up in the old saw Show, don't tell. — John Gardner

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

Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry — John Gardner

One
cannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the story
is worthwhile because until one has finished writing the story
one does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannot
judge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, because
in a first draft the style of the finished story does not yet exist. — John Gardner

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

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 writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another ... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect. — John Gardner

Sentimentality, in all its forms, is the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause. (I take it for granted that the reader understands the difference between sentiment in fiction, that is, emotion and feeling, and sentimentality, emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration. Without sentiment, fiction is worthless. Sentimentality, on the other hand, can make mush of the finest characters, actions, and ideas.) The theory of fiction as a viid, uninterrupted dream in the reader's mind logically requires an assertion that legitimate cause in fiction can be of only one kind: drama; that is, character in action. — John Gardner

Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain. — John Gardner

The more often one finds the magic key, whatever it is, the more easily the soul's groping fingers come to land on it. In magic as in other things, success brings success. — John Gardner

By the time you've run your mind through it a hundred times, relentlessly worked out every tic of terror, it's lost its power over you ... [Soon it's] a story on a page or, more precisely, everybody's story on a page. — John Gardner

Don't be fooled by clever hands, sir" the Sunlight Man said. He'd be lying with the back of his head on his hands, as he always lay. "Entertainment's all very well, but the world is serious. It's exceedingly amusing, when you think about it: nothing in life is as startling or shocking or mysterious as a good magician's trick. That's what makes stagecraft deadly. Listen closely, friend. You see great marvels performed on the stage - the lady sawed in half, the fat man supported by empty air, the Hindu vanishing with the folding of a cloth - and the subtlest of poisons drifts into your brain: you think the earth dead because the sky is full of spirits, you think the hall drab because the stage is adazzle with dimestore gilt. So King Lear rages, and the audience grows meek, and tomorrow, in the gray of old groceries, the housewife will weep for Cordelia and despair for herself. They weren't fools, those old sages who called all art the Devil's work. It eats the soul. — John Gardner

Tedium is the worst pain. the mind lays out the world in blocks, and the hushed blood waits for revenge. all order, i've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal - a harmless sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world - two snake pits. — John Gardner

True artists, whatever smiling faces they may show you, are obsessive, driven people
whether driven by some mania or driven by some high, noble vision need not presently concern us. Anyone who has worked both as artist and as professor can tell you, that he works differently in his two styles. No one is more careful, more scrupulously honest, devoted to his personal vision of the ideal, than a good professor trying to write a book about the Gilgamesh. He may write far into the night, he may avoid parties, he may feel pangs of guilt about having spent too little time with his family. Nevertheless, his work is no more like an artist's work than the work of a first-class accountant is like that of an athlete contending for a championship. — John Gardner

To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought - become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality. — John Gardner

This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he's surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand. — John Gardner

Shamash grant your wish.
What your mouth has said, may your eyes see.
May he open for you the barred path,
unclose the road for your footsteps,
unlock the mountain for your foot.
May the night give you things that please you,
and may Lugalbanda stand beside you
and satisfy your wish.
May you be granted your wish as a child is. — John Gardner

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

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

Another irritant is accidental rhyme, as in the sentence "When the rig blew, everything went flying sky-high
me too." Notice here that the rhyme is offensive because both rhyme words, "blew" and "too" are stressed positions; that is, the voice comes down hard on them. The rhyme is not offensive, to most ears, if the writer can get one of the rhymes out of stressed position: "The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying, me too. — 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 have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs. — John Gardner

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. — John Gardner

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

In university courses we do exercises. Term papers, quizzes, final examinations are not meant for publication. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party, picking up the good bits of food or conversation, bearing with the rest, going home when it comes to seem the reasonable thing to do. Art, at those moments when it feels most like art
when we feel most alive, most alert, most triumphant
is less like a cocktail party than a tank full of sharks. — John Gardner

Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum
"Write about what you know." But whether you're writing
about people or dragons, your personal observation of how
things happen in the world - how character reveals itself - can
turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice
might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly
what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,
not that they can necessarily write it down. — John Gardner

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. — John Gardner

Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of. — John Gardner

So, when I write a piece of fiction I select my characters and settings and so on because they have a bearing, at least to me, on the old unanswerable philosophical questions. And as I spin out the action, I'm always very concerned with springing discoveries
actual philosophical discoveries. But at the same time I'm concerned
and finally more concerned
with what the discoveries do to the character who makes them, and to the people around him. It's that that makes me not really a philosopher, but a novelist. — John Gardner

All writers, given adequate technique - technique that communicates - can stir our interest in their special subject matter, since at heart all fiction treats, directly or indirectly, the same thing: our love for people and the world, our aspirations and fears. The particular characters, actions, and settings are merely instances, variations on the universal theme. — John Gardner

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it's hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It's hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one's prose. — 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

Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream. — John Gardner

We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art, stop 'taking it for what it's worth' as we take our fast foods, our overpriced cars that are no good, the overpriced houses we spend all our lives fixing, our television programs, our schools thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds, our brainless fat religions, our poisonous air, our incredible cult of sports, and our ritual of fornicating with all pretty or even horse-faced strangers. We would not put up with a debauched king, but in a democracy all of us are kings, and we praise debauchery as pluralism. This book is of course no condemnation of pluralism; but it is true that art is in one sense fascistic: it claims, on good authority, that some things are healthy for individuals and society and some things are not. — John Gardner

O the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, 'nothing' is lost. — John Gardner

In writing short stories - as in writing novels - take one
thing at a time. (For some writers, this advice I'm giving may
apply best to a first draft; for others, it may hinder the flow at
first but be useful when time for revision comes.) Treat a short
passage of description as a complete unit and make that one
small unit as perfect as you can; then turn to the next unit
a passage of dialogue, say - and make that as perfect as you can.
Move to larger units, the individual scenes that together make
up the plot, and work each scene until it sparkles. — John Gardner

When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless. — John Gardner

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

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

I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout. — John Gardner

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

A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indifference; in his own nature he makes them indivisible and absolute. He knows who he is. Surely you see that... Put it this way. Dragons all love life's finer things- music, art, treasure- the works of the spirit; yet in their personal habits they're foul and bestial- they burn down cathedrals, for instance, and eat maidens- and they see in their whimsical activities no faintest contradiction... Dragons never grow, never change... Believe me, nothing in this world is more despicable than a dragon. They're a walking- or flying- condemnation of all we stand for, all we pray for our children, nay, for ourselves. We struggle to improve ourselves, we tortuously balance on the delicate line between our duties to society and our duties within- our duties to God and our own nature. — John Gardner

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

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

We know that where community exists in confers upon its members identity, a sense of belonging, and a measure of security ... Communities are the ground-level generators and preservers of values and ethical systems. — John Gardner

One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy. — John Gardner

I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of
serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive. — John Gardner

...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. — John Gardner

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. — John Gardner

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

From all we have said about plotting in general it should be evident that even in those modern plots in which events happen by laws not immediately visible, as when, for instance, the tattooed man in the circus reveals in the course of a whimsical conversation that he has on his chest a tattoo of the little girl now looking at him, a child he has never before seen, or as when, in Isak Dinesen, a decorous old nun turns abruptly into a monkey
there must be some rational or poetically persuasive basis. — John Gardner

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) — John Gardner

The future is as dark, as unreal, as the past. — John Gardner

In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another. — John Gardner

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

Daemonic compulsiveness can kill as easily as it can save.
The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent. Van
Gogh never sold a painting in his life. Poe came close with
poetry and fiction, selling very little. Drivenness only helps if
it forces the writer not to suicide but to the making of splendid
works of art, allowing him indifference to whether or not the
novel sells, whether or not it's appreciated. Drivenness is trouble
for both the novelist and his friends; but no novelist, I
think, can succeed without it. Along with the peasant in the
novelist, there must be a man with a whip. — John Gardner

Sometimes when one cannot stand the story or novel one
is working on, it helps to write something else - a different
story or novel, or essays venting one's favorite peeves, or exercises
aimed at passing the time and incidentally polishing up
one's craft. The best way in the world for breaking a writer's
block is to write a lot. Jabbering away on paper, one gets
tricked into feeling interested, all at once, in something one is
saying, and behold, the magic waters are flowing again. Often
it helps to work on a journal, since that allows the writer to
write about those things that most interest him, yet frees him
of the pressure of achievement and encourages him to develop
a more natural, more personal style. — John Gardner

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot ... — John Gardner

I think of the pastness of the past: how the moment I am alive in, prisoned in, moves like a slowly tumbling form through darkness, the underground river. Not only ancient history - the mythical age of the brothers' feud - but my own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence. — John Gardner

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 what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that. — John Gardner

What the best fiction does is make powerful affirmations of familiar truths ... the trivial fiction which times filters out is that which either makes wrong affirmations or else makes affirmations in a squeaky little voice. Powerful affirmation comes from strong intellect and strong emotions supported by adequate technique. — John Gardner

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. — John Gardner

It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive - literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell - it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, willing to give up almost anything for his art, and makes him, if he fails, such a miserable human being. — John Gardner

Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile. — John Gardner

We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party ... Art ... is less like a cocktail party thank a tank of shark. — John Gardner

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

Writer's block comes from the feeling that one is doing the
wrong thing or doing the right thing badly. Fiction written for
the wrong reason may fail to satisfy the motive behind it and
thus may block the writer, as I've said; but there is no wrong
motive for writing fiction. At least in some instances, good
fiction has come from the writer's wish to be loved, his wish
to take revenge, his wish to work out his psychological woes,
his wish for money, and so on. No motive is too low for art;
finally it's the art, not the motive, that we judge. — John Gardner

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.
"Give me your left eye," said the king of the trolls, "and I'll tell you."
Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. "Now tell me."
The troll said, "The secret is, Watch with both eyes! — John Gardner

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

Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers. — John Gardner

Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence of any thing is infinite. — John Gardner

The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he's lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he's invaded is unlikely to accept him fully. — John Gardner

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

Because his art is such
a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world
as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high
school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious
law firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may be
still sweating out his first novel. — John Gardner

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 a page; we begin to see images. — John Gardner

Another bad cure is the sentence awkwardly stretched out by a "that" or "which" clause. For example, "Leaping from the couch he seized the revolver from the bookshelf that stood behind the armchair," or, "She turned, shrieking, throwing up her arms in terror at the sight of the gorilla that had arrive that morning from Africa, which had formerly been its home." What happens in such sentences, obviously, is that they tend to trail off, lose energy. — John Gardner

They hacked down trees widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigeon fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange. they thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set accidental fire that would burn for days. their sheep killed hedges, snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what might have grown. hrothgar's tribe made boats to drive farther north and west. there was nothing to stop the advance of man. huge boars fled at the click of a harness. wolves would cower in the glens like foxes when they caught that deadly scent. i was filled with a wordless, obscurely murderous unrest. — John Gardner

There is no limit to desire but desire's needs. — John Gardner

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound. — John Gardner

Find a pile of gold and sit on it. — John Gardner

We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair
despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler qualities we ourselves, out of long familiarity, have forgotten we possess. That, of course, is why the suicidal person is difficult around his friends. — John Gardner