The question, I’ve come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed. – Jonathan Safran Foer
All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce – you are never indifferent to them. – Jonathan Safran Foer
There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on. – 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
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. – 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
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
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
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. – 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
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. – 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
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
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
It’s hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don’t think it is necessary to or necessarily good to. – Jonathan Safran Foer
I’m interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I’m not so interested in the comforting kind of religion. – Jonathan Safran Foer