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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Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?
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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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Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential.
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Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.
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I wish I could have lived just one day when the world was new. I wish—I wish I could have reaped just one single, solitary, big Emotion before the world had caught it and—appraised it—and taxed it—and licensed it—and staled it!
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It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him.
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Silence is also conversation.
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The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
