"They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.'"
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

"...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 Champlin Gardner Jr.

"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 Champlin Gardner Jr. (On Moral Fiction)

"Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality."
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (On Writers and Writing)

"Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps overhead."
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

"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--"
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers)

"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 Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

"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 Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

"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."
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)