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.

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

The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.

...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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.

When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.

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.

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--

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

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

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

Find a pile of gold and sit on it.

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.

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

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

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, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

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 that, finally and absolutely, i alone exist. all the rest, i saw, is merely what pushes me, or what i push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. i create the whole universe, blink by blink.