John Gardner > Quotes

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

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“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.”
― 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

“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, On Becoming a Novelist

“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, Grendel

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

“The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.”
― John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“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.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.”
― John Gardner, On Writers and Writing

“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.”
― 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, On Becoming a Novelist

“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 Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“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, 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 Gardner, Grendel

“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, Grendel

“There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“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, On Moral Fiction

“Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.”
― John Gardner, In the Suicide Mountains

“I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“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, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“...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

“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, Grendel

“Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.”
― John Gardner

“Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in his writing. He never forgets that his audience is, at least ideally, as noble, generous, and tolerant as he is himself (or more so), and never forgets that he is writing about people, so that to turn characters to cartoons, or treat his characters as innately inferior to himself, to forget their reasons for being as they are, to treat them as brutes, is bad art. Sanity in a writer also involves taste . . . To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have loved someone dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, 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 remember to 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.”
― John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps overhead.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“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, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“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 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, Grendel

“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, Grendel

“Find a pile of gold and sit on it.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“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

“In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue--by reason and by banging the table--for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least an evasion of too fashionable simplifications.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“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, Grendel

“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

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

“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, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“I have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“Descubrí lo que todo buen escritor sabe: que conseguir escribir exactamente lo que se pretende decir ayuda a descubrir lo que se pretende decir.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“He could never forgive her for "cheating" on his father. His words, not hers. A child's word. "Selfish bitch," he'd called her once, he who knew nothing of selfishness or bitchery, no more than he knew of selflessness or whatever the opposite of bitchery was (sophrosyne?), knew only his own colossal ego, too self-centered even to understand why he couldn't simply dismiss her as evil and forget it. Sweet Christ how she hated him! But no. No more than she hated his father. It was past that. Caught in impossibilities, but knowing, at least, why she hated the part of herself she hated and why she could not escape, ever, for all the grinning cow-catchers and whistling boats and twinkling propellers in Christendom. Ah, Christendom! she thought.”
― John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues

“He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too.”
― John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“He was saner than anyone --had fallen out of the world of illusion: love, interesting work, hope for the future.”
― John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“Mickelsson looked at her, surprised to discover that she was stupid.”
― John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know”
― 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, The Sunlight Dialogues