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" Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer