## Metadata - Author: [[John Gardner]] - Full Title: The Art of Fiction - Category: #books ## Highlights - He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot; or, as Coleridge puts it, he must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite “I AM.” ([Location 733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003N9AZG4&location=733)) - Some bad men write good books, admittedly, but the reason is that when they’re writing they’re better men than when they beat their wives and children. When he writes, the man of impetuous bad character has time to reconsider. The fictional process helps him say what he might not have said that same night in the tavern. Good men, on the other hand, need not necessarily write good books. Good-heartedness and sincerity are no substitute for rigorous pursuit of the fictional process. ([Location 1253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003N9AZG4&location=1253)) - It is sometimes remarked, not by enemies of fiction but by people who love it, that whereas scientists and politicians work for progress, the writer of fiction restates what has always been known, finding new expression for familiar truths, adapting to the age truths that may seem outmoded. ([Location 1258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003N9AZG4&location=1258))