{"author":"John Gardner","author_id":"John+Gardner","total_quotes":40,"quotes":[{"text":"I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. It's all a hero asks for.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["grendel","hero","john-gardner","mgg","optimism"],"id":2816,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["advice","novel-writing","tips","writer-s-block","writing","writing-advice"],"id":24403,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.).","author":"John Gardner","tags":["books","craft","craftsmanship","fiction","genre-fiction","how-to-write","how-to-write-fiction","instruction","low-brow","pulp","pulp-fiction","technique","writing"],"id":26695,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["advice","novel-writing","tips","writer-s-block","writing"],"id":28010,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["writing","writing-craft"],"id":34076,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?","author":"John Gardner","tags":["identity","purpose-in-life","questioning","search-for-meaning"],"id":67109,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["novel-writing","writer-s-block","writers","writing"],"id":80681,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"God be kind to all good Samaritans and also bad ones. For such is the kingdom of heaven.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["prayer"],"id":84512,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["illusion","order","reason"],"id":87166,"author_id":"John+Gardner"},{"text":"Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.","author":"John Gardner","tags":["reality","self-pity"],"id":117611,"author_id":"John+Gardner"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":40,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}