Explore Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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

The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.

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.

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.

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.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.

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?

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.

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

You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.

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.