Top 44 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.

These little daily choices that we’re so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat – to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.

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.

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.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don’t want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it’s also a parent’s worst nightmare: That they won’t need you. It’s like the real tragedy of parenting.

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.

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.

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.

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

Maybe one day the world will change, that we’ll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it’s inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn’t matter right now.

Why do I write? It’s not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

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.

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.

It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven’t.

I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends’ houses. I like places where there’s stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.

As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We’ve never claimed more, and we’ve never had less.

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.

There are a lot of things that we crave, there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to.

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.

People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don’t want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.

Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it’s rarely driving the car.

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It’s already happening.

I’ve never particularly liked bankers.

We shouldn’t be intimidated by someone else’s idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.

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.

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it’s hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

There’s no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.

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.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

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.

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.

You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.

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.

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change – which lasted a couple of weeks – was based on the very simple instinct that it’s wrong to kill animals for food.

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.

It’s possible to make things that aren’t just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.