John Gardner Quotes
The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
Quotes to Explore
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
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Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.
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Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.
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Film has always been a really good tool for me to communicate emotion about why I create a collection. I'm probably one of the first designers to make short films.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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It is my absolute belief that Indians have unlimited talent. I have no doubt about our capabilities.
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Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art.
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Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
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When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.
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I love science fiction.
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As a Westerner, the child of civil rights and anti-war activists, I embraced Islam not in abandonment of my core values, drawn almost entirely from the progressive tradition, but as an affirmation of them.
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There's nobility in hard work, traditional values.
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Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.
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All my career, all that I've really done has been based on emotion and intuition and gravitating toward what sounds good.
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Sex is emotion in motion.
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'Can't Get Closer' I originally recorded in about half an hour, just on my bed with a microphone. I actually re-recorded the song with a cleaner vocal take, but I decided to leave the demo version on there, just because I felt that instant where it was created is what captured the most emotion.
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In the aftermath of September 11, it has been made clear to us that our foreign policy can no longer afford to narrowly focus on short-term benefits. For our nation's long-term security, we must be active in promoting American values abroad through our foreign policy.
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There are two restraints which God has laid upon human nature, shame and fear; shame is the weaker, and has place only in those in whom there are some reminders of virtue.
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I continued to find myself in a constant process of attempting to deconstruct values that were cultural and replace them with the legitimate teachings of Jesus - no matter how crazy that made me look to the world or Christians around me.
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As the Hindu gods are 'immortal' only in a very particular sense - for they had born and they die - they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details... and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beigns by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human beign, however 'archetypal' his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are masks behind which we see our own faces.
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That memory was a knife that kept on cutting.
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I know where the people are and I know how talented people are. Sometimes they aren't given opportunities because people come with their own biases about what Bahamians can do, especially if they're foreign productions.
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The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
