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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

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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
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That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.
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Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?
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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
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September 11 had such a strong visual component, the most visually documented event in human history. Nothing's ever been seen by as many people as that was. Our experiences of the day, our memories of the day are just so tied up in images of buildings falling and bodies falling.
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Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.
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Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.
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He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
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[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.
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If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
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Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.
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There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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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.
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I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?
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