Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.
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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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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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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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We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.
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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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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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It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.
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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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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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All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
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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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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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The best books are the ones that ask the most questions.
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Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
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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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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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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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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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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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I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
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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.