Joshua Foer Quotes

I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

Why take notes? The obvious reason is to remember. Visual note-taking translates what we hear into pictures that give context, color, and meaning. By adding symbols, visual metaphors, likenesses of people, and room layouts, we add several dimensions.

In some ways, I'm just a visual person.

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

'Simeon's Gift' is really - it's about a musician who - in the Middle Ages, who goes out to find his muse.

No amount of technology is going to change the fact that people process information visually.

Music videos are an especially fun thing to watch - I bet from the outside, too - because you learn so much, just like in our music... It's really fun work.

I always had the feeling, even when I started, that my photography was meant to be archival in nature. Sort of like wine, I guess - they get better with age.

I'm a visual learner, so with hand-eye coordination, I was a natural.

I always carry a sketchbook around with me, and I sketch whenever I can... I might be in a financial review and be sketching because I find that I actually listen better when I sketch. Truth be told, there are probably more sketches in my books than there are written notes.

I keep a composition book with me at all times to write rhymes, to write down ideas, write down my thoughts, you know just so I don't forget any ideas.

In the same way I accumulate objects, I also accumulate images, and I find them arranging themselves into categories, too. And some images insist on being painted; others don't.

One person might be able to learn by reading, another will have a good audio memory, and another will make notes in different colored pens. I have a more multi sensory memory - I remember what I was doing when I learnt it and where I was.

There's a lot of different things that make me want to take photos. A lot of it is, for a long time I've been obsessed with the thought of time travel with my camera.

For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it's sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America.

I'm a hypervisual person.

We have to create images that remain in people's memory because a film is judged by what they have already seen. You are trying to create an image that is unique and you have to employ all the resources available to you.

You are either visual or you're not.

I'm a visual person, a conceptual person.

The truth is, I don't sketch much at all. I have a very visual/spatial brain that retains a lot of information about maps, directions, positioning, and details, so I usually prefer working out those issues on the page itself.

When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.

Why did Ted Geisel end up writing and illustrating for young minds? He has specific imagery in the book, and we never would have moved beyond the discussion phase, if we couldn't have found an expression for The Lorax, dimensionally, that was true to the soul of what comes through in his simple line drawings, on the page.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.

the best way to remember a beautiful city or a beautiful painting is to eat something while you are looking at it. The flavor really helps the image to penetrate the body. It fixes it as lacquer does a drawing.