Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foeris an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and for his non-fiction work Eating Animals. He teaches creative writing at New York University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 February 1977
CountryUnited States of America
animal children eating inspired
My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
answer god word
I will never come around to the idea of an anthropomorphic God. I'm also uncomfortable with the word 'God'... I'm agnostic about the answer and I'm agnostic about the question.
bad choices front goal perfect recognize somehow street stuff time
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.
confront lies telling
When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.
reminds
When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.
asking move
You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.
formats move toward
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.
lend people sort themselves
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.
again confronted fish living might problem sharing
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.
believed possess simply unlike
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?
alienate eating ethical funny meat people rest talk
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.
making-love bears absence
He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.
father love-you writing
Darling, You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. Your father
children parent knowledgeable
Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.