Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.
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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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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 you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.
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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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Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
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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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The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.
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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.
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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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For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.
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Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
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We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.
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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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It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.
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The best books are the ones that ask the most questions.
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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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I think there's going to be something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them.
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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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Why wouldn't - how couldn't - an author care about how his or her books look?
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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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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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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.