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
block animal meat-industry
What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.
block writing two
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.
became claim high identities people school seemed vegetarian whose
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.
ask best
The best books are the ones that ask the most questions.
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.
conversation starts
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.
art
There's no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.
food longer obsessed obsession price sad sort
There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.
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.
clear draw good hard life necessary
It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.
It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.
excited larger picture time worth
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.
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?
protecting shoot
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?