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

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Read
Write
Need
Needs
Writing
Something
Always
Rather

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I've never particularly liked bankers.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.
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Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Abraham responds Here I am when God asks him to sacrifice his son, and he answers Here I am when his son asks him about what is happening. It's a paradoxical moment. He can't be fully present for his God or his son.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I think it's a greater risk not to write about 9\11. If you're in my position - a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about - I think it's risky to avoid what's right in front of you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
Jonathan Safran Foer