John Gardner Quotes

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.

I had to write 1500 words on advertising and marketing at the weekend for my business management course, and you can't think about rugby while you are doing that!

Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages.

and half of learning to play is learning what not to play and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove she crawls out on a limb and begins to build her home and it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not alone up up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple but god's work isn't done by god it's done by people

Popular success is a wonderful gift if it happens, but like money, it's not the motivation. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.

I think the relationship [in Aquarius] with her nephew shows that she's not nostalgic. She just wants to preserve what is important to her - her records, her books, even some furniture. She doesn't want to leave that house because it is her home. That is where her kids were born. After moving so much in my life, I was touched by Clara's need to stay in that apartment. I love her life, and that may be why I connected to her so strongly. We are the most alike when we are fighting for our rights.

The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.

If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

The reason I love blogs so much right now is that I am seeing more critical voices appear, and that's kind of thrilling. I think a lot of critics in their forties or even their thirties have had their voice scared or trained out of them by the academy. I have nothing against the academy. I think it's brilliant and fantastic, but I also think that it's become almost monolithic. The same way a lot of art looks the same, a lot of writing can sound the same and quotes the same theorists.

Throw strikes. Home plate don't move.

In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.

I am not a difficult man by any stretch, and I'm saying that with a full and honest inventory going on. I'm not. And I'm not angry on stage. There is a heightening. There is an intensification of the feelings on stage in order to let them carry the room. There is a theatricality about it. The whole thing is oratory, so there's persuasion involved. There's the art of rhetoric involved. And so, with hyperbole and with the desire to really punch the thing home, some of it reads a little more angry.

I just really care about what people see. I want them to know that I'm working hard for this. The artists that I look up to like, you know, Michael, Prince, James Brown. You watch them and you understand that they're paying attention to the details of their art. And they care so much about what they're wearing, about how they're moving, about how they're making the audience feel. They're not phoning it in. They're going up there to murder anybody that performs after them or performs before them. That's what I've watched my whole life and admired.