"Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality."
"A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully."
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Source: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers.
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More quotes by John Gardner
"Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see."
"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."
"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."
"i understand that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. i understood that, finally and absolutely, i alone exist. all the rest, i saw, is merely what pushes me, or what i push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. i create the whole universe, blink by blink."
"What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience."