Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

Related Quotes:

" All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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? "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

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 is no greater gift than time. "

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

" Why wouldn't - how couldn't - an author care about how his or her books look? "

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

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

" 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

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

" 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. "

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

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

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