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As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Words
Page
Putting
Pages
Pay
Writer
Attention

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.
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I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: I look at what I write so I can see what I think.
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Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.
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She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing. So what's something? Being reliable is something. Being good.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Love...is the immovability of truth.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
Jonathan Safran Foer