129 Quotes by John Gardner

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

Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.

The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

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

Find a pile of gold and sit on it.

Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign

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.

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

Fiction is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death.