129 Quotes by John Gardner

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

Onecannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the storyis worthwhile because until one has finished writing the storyone does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannotjudge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, becausein a first draft the style of the finished story does not yet exist.

He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize.

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

One has to 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. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then tothe deep craziness of life itself—as when in Anna Karenina, Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.

Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum"Write about what you know." But whether you're writingabout people or dragons, your personal observation of howthings happen in the world—how character reveals itself—canturn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advicemight be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactlywhat is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,not that they can necessarily write it down.

The question one asks of the young writer who wants toknow if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels whatyou want to do? Really want to do?"If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is:Do it. In fact, he will anyway.

Descubrí lo que todo buen escritor sabe: que conseguir escribir exactamente lo que se pretende decir ayuda a descubrir lo que se pretende decir.

...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.