Quote about John Gardner: “The late John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Since women, for many years, were denied the journey, they were left with only one plot in their lives — to await the stranger. Indeed, there is essentially no picaresque tradition among women novelists. While the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a change of tendency, women’s literature from Austen to Woolf is by and large a literature about waiting, usually for love.” ― Mary Morris, The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers
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“What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience. ”
John Gardner
“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and…
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West Coast Review 