John Gardner Quotes

Art is an investigation.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession. But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

Each painting, I feel like I kind of might have gotten something. If I feel like I totally got it, there's probably something wrong and it's not finished. And if I really feel like I understand it then I'm done with these paintings and I'll have to do something else.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Making art has never been a mystery to me. It's never been something that's very difficult.

Art is science made clear.

Life has to have the plenitude of art.

It's good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that's better than you'd imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

I wasn't in the art world at all as a kid; I was just creative, and we were always doing arts and crafts.

As an artist, you find at different times you want to do different things.

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Without electricity, there can be no art.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.