Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

I've loved art for more than 30 years.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.