John Gardner Writing Quotations

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.

Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.

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.

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know

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.

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.