Amy

“To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles—patterns for communicating feeling and thought—become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“...art deals, at its best, with what has never been observed, or observed only peripherally-darts from what is to what might have been-asking with total interest and sobriety such questions as 'what if apple trees could talk?' or 'what if the haughty old woman next door should fall in love with Mr. Powers, our mailman?' The artist's imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True art is a conduit between body and soul, between feeling unabstracted and abstraction unfelt.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Art is as original and important as it is precisely because it does not start out with clear knowledge of what it means to say.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction