Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or “way,” an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious – a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand – and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.

— John Gardner

John Gardner Quotes

So it goes with me day by day and age by age, I tell myself. Locked in the deadly progression of moon and stars. I shake my head, muttering darkly on shaded paths, holding conversation with the only friend and comfort this world allows, my shadow.

— John Gardner

Art begins in a wound, an imperfection – a wound inherent in the nature of life itself – and is an attempt either to live with the wound or heal it. It is the pain of the wound which impels the artist to do his work, and the universality of woundedness in the human condition which makes the work of art significant as medicine or distraction.

— John Gardner

A true work of fiction does all of the following things, and does them elegantly, efficiently: it creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind; it is implicitly philosophical; it fulfills or at least deals with all of the expectations it sets up; and it strikes us, in the end, not simply as a thing done but as a shining performance.

— John Gardner

The immorality of an inept poet is like that of a sleeping guard or a drunken bus driver.

— John Gardner

The sun backs away from the world like a crab and the days grow shorter, the nights grow longer, more dark and dangerous.

— John Gardner

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

— John W. Gardner

A generation doesn’t have much choice in the problems that the forces of history throw in its lap. It does have a choice as to whether it will face those problems honestly. We need continuous and candid debate as to what the most important problems are, and whether we’re turning our backs on them or solving them or making them worse.

— John W. Gardner

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied “Only stand out of my light”. Perhaps someday we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

— John W. Gardner

Do you think it possible for a woman to love two men at the same time?’ ‘A man can love two women, so I see no problem.

— John Gardner

Across the hidden places of my heart, You search me out; Following the tracery of my daily life So Death can never conquer The secret generations of our souls. The.

— John Gardner

All June I bound the rose in sheaves.’ Then.

— John Gardner

True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art’s proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.

— John Gardner

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

Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game-or so a troll might say-because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.

— John Gardner

The critic’s proper business is explanation and evaluation, which means he must make use of his analytic powers to translate the concrete to the abstract.

— John Gardner

The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net. This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material.

— John Gardner

True art is too complex to reflect the party line.

— John Gardner

We are rich in schools which speak of how art ‘works’ and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do.

— John Gardner

Revolution, my dear Prince, is not the substitution of immoral for moral, or of illegitimate for legitimate violence; it is simply the pitting of power against power where the issue is freedom for the winners and enslavement of the rest.

— John Gardner

If you with your knowledge of present and past recall that a certain man slipped on, say, a banana peel, or fell off his chair, or drowned in a river, that recollection does not mean that you caused him to slip, or fall, or drown. Correct? Of course it’s correct! It happened, and you know it, but knowledge is not cause. Of course! Anyone who argues otherwise is a stupid ignoramus. Well, so with me. My knowledge of the future does not cause the future. It merely sees it.

— John Gardner
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