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" It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

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

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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? "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

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

" It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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? "

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

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer