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
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