John Gardner on Writing Quotes

“No one with a distorted view of reality can write good novels, because as we read we measure fictional worlds against the real world. Fiction elaborated out of attitudes we find childish or tiresome in life very soon becomes tiresome.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“To be psychologically suited for membership in what I have called the highest class of novelists, the writer must be not only capable of understanding people different from himself but fascinated by such people . . . and have sufficient self-esteem that he is not threatened by difference.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“The beginning novelist who has the gift for inhabiting other lives has perhaps the best chance for success.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“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, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“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, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction