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
dark people heartbeat
Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.
bored waiting darkness
Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
writing dark light
Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.
memories dark science
Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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.