Johngardner Quotes

“True art is too complex to reflect the party line.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game-or so a troll might say-because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net. This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Art combines fancy and judgement.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things out to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Most art these days is either trivial or false. There has always been bad art, but only when a culture's general world view and aesthetic theory have gone awry is bad art what most artists strive for, mistaking bad for good. In Plato's Athens or Shakespeare's London, who would have clapped for the merdistes? For the most part our artists do not struggle-as artists have traditionally struggled-toward a vision of how things out to be or what has gone wrong; they do not provide us with the flicker of lightning that shows us where we are. Either they pointlessly waste our time, saying and doing nothing, or they celebrate ugliness and futility, scoffing at good. Every new novelist, composer,and painter-or so we're told-is more 'distrubing' than the last. The good of humanity is left in the hands of politicians.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“We are rich in schools which speak of how art 'works' and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Structuralists, formalists, linguistic philosophers who tell us that works of art are like trees-simply objects for perception-all avoid on principle the humanistic questions: who will this work of art help? what baby is it squashing? The business of criticism has become definition, morality reduced to the positivist ideal of clarity. The trouble is that clarity on the wrong subject can be dangerously misleading, as when we define Count Fosco's crocodile as a smiling animal weighing four hundred pounds.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“My enemies define themselves (as the dragon told me) on me. As for myself, I could finish them off in a single night […] yet I hold back. I am hardly blind to the absurdity. Form is function. What will we call the Hrothgar-Wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked? (p.79)”
― John Gardner, Grendel