Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.
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I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.
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The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
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My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
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There is no greater gift than time.
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The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
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Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
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You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.
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The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
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As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
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That's the nice thing about being a vegetarian. You don't have to be neurotic. Selective omnivores have to be neurotic. Personally, I don't have time for all that; I don't want to get into it.
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There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.
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We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
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My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.
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Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.
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When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.
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We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.
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How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?
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Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.
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I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
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The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism.
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All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
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It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.
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Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.