Quote

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Doubt
Impossible
Bigs
Self
Writing
Excruciatingly
Even
Editing
Deal
Deals

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Image
Why I'm not where you are ...
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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
Image
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
Jonathan Safran Foer