“Though no one can say what the number is, the number of fictional elements that exist is finite, like the number of words in the English language.” John Gardner
“Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It’s the aim of art to give it some.” Jean Anouilh
“A fictional element can be appropriate or not by only one of two standards: It is appropriate to the work as an art object without reference to reality, or it is appropriate as we test it against our sense of the actual.” John Gardner
“This means, of course, that he must learn to see fiction’s elements as only a writer does: as the fundamental units of an ancient but still valid kind of thought; what I have sometimes called concrete philosophy.” John Gardner
“Art is the result of integration of all its components. One can add that the result invites contribution of and from its beholder.” L. Ron Hubbard
“I usually find after about 20,000 words that you know whether you’ve got a book or not because you feel it grip.” John Fowles
“I’m sick to death of the inarticulate hero. To hell with the inarticulate.” John Fowles
“A poem is a novel with lots of space.” Ulf Wolf
“Art is not philosophy but, as R. G. Collingwood said, the cutting edge of philosophy.” John Gardner
“What is meant by the advice to write as we speak is to write as we might speak if we spoke extremely well.” Jacques Barzun
“Better still to be alone with one’s books. They tell their incredible stories at the time when you want to hear them.” Paulo Coelho
“The skill [of writing stream of consciousness prose] consists in interweaving thought and act intelligibly in a flow of images; it is their continuity despite mutual interruptions that conveys the impression of a mental stream.” Jacques Barzun
“The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work.” Flannery O’Connor
“The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” Flannery O’Connor
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. . . . We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.” Flannery O’Connor
“It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.” Flannery O’Connor
“A work of art exists without its author from the moment the words are on paper, and the more complete the work, the less important it is who wrote it and why.” Flannery O’Connor
“The intentions of the writer have to be found in the work itself, and not in his life.” Flannery O’Connor
“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.” Flannery O’Connor
“Today’s audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.” Flannery O’Connor
“He [St. Thomas Aquinas] says that a work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten.” Flannery O’Connor
“A writer writes about what he is able to make believable.” Flannery O’Connor
“The writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn’t mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn’t try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so.” Flannery O’Connor
“Arthur Koestler has said that he would swap a hundred readers now for ten in ten years and that he would swap those ten for one in a hundred years.” Flannery O’Connor
“The fact is that if the writer’s attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.” Flannery O’Connor
“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” Flannery O’Connor
“In the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.” Flannery O’Connor
“The fundamental concepts of fiction—how one event must cause another (however the order of events may be disguised by flashbacks or by odd narrative technique); how characters’ motives must be shown dramatically, not just talked about; how setting, character, and action must interpenetrate, each supporting and infusing the others; how plot must have rhythm, so that in some way it builds in intensity toward an emotional high point; how the narrative must have design, a firm structure that gives every part value but does not vulgarly call attention to itself; how style, plot, and meaning must finally be all one.” John Gardner
“If you have prepared yourself well, there is noting more anyone need tell you. If you have taken time to learn to write beautiful, rock-firm sentences, if you have mastered evocation of the vivid and continuous dream, if you are generous enough in your personal character to treat imaginary characters and readers fairly, if you have held on to your childhood virtues and have not settled for literary standards much lower than those of the fiction you admire, then the novel you will write will eventually be, after the necessary labor of repeated revision, a novel to be proud of, one that almost certainly someone, sooner or later, will be glad to publish.” John Gardner
