Technically our novelists (for instance) are shrewd enough, and publis — John Gardner (American writer)

"Its true that, in my books, monsters are always important. People are monsters, people are called monsters by other characters, and so on. Really, there are three kinds of things that are important in my things, I think. One is monsters, another is clowns, and another is human beings, and of course, they keep shapeshifting. One turns into the other. Clowns are always trying to be human beings. What I mean by clowns is this: Human beings do things and clowns desperately try to imitate human beings, so the acrobat gets up on the wire, and then the clown wants to be an acrobat and he tries, but hes a straw man and he cant be. Hes always acting. Hes always pretending. Hes always faking and mimicking. Many of us feel that about ourselves all the time. That is to say, we put on masks and never find out who we really are. And one of the things that happens in a novel is characters who start out as clowns try to earn the grade as human beings, and sometimes they turn into monsters instead. Monsters are those things that I used to go to Saturday afternoon movies and see. I mean by monsters, "walking dead". I mean nihilists. People who really have given up on all faith and so on, and act as if the world were evil, and as if all people were either stupid or malicious. Theyre creatures who have given in to the emotional war thats in everybody. Sometimes, I use, for instance, in Henry Soames in Nickel Mountain, a monstrous kind of body which contains monstrous emotions, but hes holding it in, and the thing of course, finally, is that he really is a monster and hes holding it in and that makes him human, that constantly he does what he knows is right, whatever the power of his emotions. So, your monsters are everywhere."

"[John Gardner would] take one of my early efforts at a story and go over it with me. I remember him as being very patient, wanting me to understand what he was trying to show me, telling me over and over how important it was to have the right words saying what I wanted them to say. Nothing vague or blurred, no smoked-glass prose. And he kept drumming at me the importance of using—I dont know how else to say it—common language, the language of normal discourse, the language we speak to each other in. [...] All I know is that the advice he was handing out in those days was just what I needed at that time. He was a wonderful teacher. It was a great thing to have happen to me at that period of my life, to have someone who took me seriously enough to sit down and go over a manuscript with me. I knew something crucial was happening to me, something that mattered. He helped me to see how important it was to say exactly what I wanted to say and nothing else; not to use "literary" words or "pseudo-poetic" language. He taught me to use contractions in my writing. He helped show me how to say what I wanted to say and to use the minimum number of words to do so. He made me see that absolutely everything was important in a short story. It was of consequence where the commas and periods went."

"As my teacher, John C. Gardner did not so much bring me to the word, as he carried me home once again to the flesh of the words that so much of my academic background had year after bloody year destroyed. He returned the eye that the king of trolls had stolen from Woden, my eye that too many literary critics had forced to become blind to listening. John made reading–in place of mere meaning-scavenging–possible once again. The boundless page of schizophrenic resistance. He put me in a position to begin forgetting in order to remember, not with some sort of Garden of Eden innocence, but with voices, echoes, and uncertainty. John blew off the institutional dust that had, because of the desire of the academic industries to explain away beauty, accumulated over William Faulkner’s breathing and returned me to the dizzy breathlessness of Faulkner’s writing. Faulkner’s words, John reminded me, are made from blood, are marked in blood; they are not simply palaces of meaning, convoluted places where dead or dying scholars meet to whisper over the runes in secretive hermeneutic struggles. Read Faulkner’s sentences aloud. Feel them move, not from the page, but from inside the depths of your own body. It was with the recovery of this listening eye that I was finally able to burst into writing. John taught me to hear in physical ways the rhythm of my lips forming words. The touching of two lips, of lips to tongue, each-to-each. The ineluctable modality of the visible. Closed eyes on a beach."

"I remember John’s hands wrapped around his pipe. His scent. I remember descending into the basement of the English Department building at S.U.N.Y.-Binghamton and thinking this is the home of John, Grendel’s dragon. Smoking. I can’t imagine John in a smokeless building. Knowing John, he’d burn such buildings to the ground. Return such an idea to some level of Dante’s Hell. Why should buildings be kept so innocent of a man’s presence? John’s steaming pipe was a part of his signature. I am thankful that I studied with him before the panics of second hand smoke. Of course, John was not much for obeying signs. And he belonged in that basement, or, more aptly, the basement belonged to John. He was “of” the basement. Soiled man of mud. The earth. Other professors seemed out of place down there. Almost frightened by the cold, damp, crusty hallway. All of them seemed to be struggling to get better offices, offices on the first floor among the living. Not John. This was John’s lair. He once told me that the walls of the school would fall down if he ever left. Now, when I return to Binghamton, more than anything else I feel John’s absence. The halls no longer seem to be on fire."

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"