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" I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones. "

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" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Think

Wife

" 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. "

" 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

Way

Just

" People don't care enough. They don't get worked up enough. They don't get angry enough. They don't get passionate enough. I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it. "

" The best books are the ones that ask the most questions. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Find

Kind

" The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better. "

" People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. "

" 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? "

" Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed. "

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

" My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Kind

Only

" Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at? "

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

" My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice. "

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

Children

Matters

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

" 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. "