Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.
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We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit.
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In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.
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In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.
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It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth.
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I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.
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I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.
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There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
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What the world does not need is a Haggadah that pats itself on the back. It needs a Haggadah that gets out of the way, that starts a conversation and gets out of the way.
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I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
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I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.
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It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
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I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.
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There's no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.
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I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.
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I've never particularly liked bankers.
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There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.
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I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally, the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics.
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It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.
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It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
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My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.
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There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.
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Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.