Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate TV?

They say the movies should be more like life; I think life should be more like the movies.

I think when people talk about art imitating life, you're in real time.

Art informs life in so many ways, and vice versa.

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it's as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

It is, in fact, safe to assume that, more often than not, life imitates craft, for who among us can say that our experience does not more closely resemble a macramé plant holder than it does a painting by Seurat. When it comes to art, life is the biggest copycat in the matter of the frame.

In my inner soul art and life are inseparable.

How life did imitate art sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.

However much you are read in theory, if thou hast no practice thou art ignorant

At its heart, music is all higher mathematics.

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

It's sometimes hard to talk about politics and art. Obviously, I have my core beliefs, but I think art is best when it's troublesome and pushes against stuff.

Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.

Obviously, the intention was not to go back to images traditionally valued as worthy or holy images and shapes, but exactly the opposite; its main purpose had to be, to realise as sacred art anything which so far had been regarded as of little value and pitiful.

Miley is always on, she’s always funny, she’s always writing songs, she’s always making music. The parallel of the film is like Miley says, going back to her home, going back to her roots. Getting back to Tennessee was art imitating life imitating art.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial.

The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.

None the less, perhaps, the highest pleasure in art is identical with the highest pleasure inscientific theory. The emotion which accompanies the clear recognition of unity in a complex seems to be so similar in art and in science that it is difficult not to suppose that they are psychologically the same. It is, as it were, the final stage of both processes.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

All art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.