John C Gardner Quotes & Sayings

The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion. — John W. Gardner

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance. — John W. 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

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

Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. — John Gardner

Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. — John W. Gardner

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning. — John W. Gardner

He was saner than anyone --had fallen out of the world of illusion: love, interesting work, hope for the future. — John Gardner

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are. — John W. Gardner

It was [John Gardner's] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. — Raymond Carver

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

Gilgamesh said to him, to Utnapishtim the remote,
What can I do, Utnapishtim? Where can I go?
A thief has stolen my flesh.
Death lives in the house where my bed is,
and wherever I set my feet, there Death is. — John Gardner

I know what's in your mind. I know everything. That's what makes me so sick and old and tired. — 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

Fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds. — John Gardner

One man interacting creatively with others can move the world. — John W. 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

It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs. — John W. Gardner

All that we know about the interaction between leaders and constituents or followers tells us that communication and influence flow in both directions; and in that two-way communication, nonrational, nonverbal, and unconscious elements play their part. — John W. 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

What true materialist would settle for a MacDonald's hamburger? — John Gardner

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards. — John W. 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

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

More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery. — John W. Gardner

It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?
Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart. — James C. Collins

Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is - sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes. — 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

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