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

Jonathan Safran Foer

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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

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Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
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A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
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I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
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He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.
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We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against.
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The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.
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Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.
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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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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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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
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I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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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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We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
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My insides don't match up with my outsides. Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? I don't know. I'm only me. Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.
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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.
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