Quotes by John Gardner

All order, Ive 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.

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

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

...{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.

Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.Give me your left eye, said the king of the trolls, and Ill tell you. Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. Now tell

Its not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.

Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole worlds meaningless. The hero sees values beyond whats possible. Thats the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.

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

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room were sitting in, forgetting its 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.

“I know everything, you see, the old voice wheedled. The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception.”

“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 its 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.”