John Gardner (British writer) Quotes

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that ...

A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indi...

We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair--...

Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The...

I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everythin...

When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,...

What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?

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

I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after ...

It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.

My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.

All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal — a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men ...

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I ...

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flic...

...ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ...

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go ...

The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their ...

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published,...

Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives...

Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense ...

The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and cl...

True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and ...

God be kind to all good Samaritans and also bad ones. For such is the kingdom of heaven.

The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.

The writer's characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that ...

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, ea...

This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of depar...

...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling hims...

As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinc...

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thriller...

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the...

The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivi...

Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, af...

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble...

When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the samefirst thrill of achievement that the yo...

The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.

As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day,...

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly a...

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed...