Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer

27 quotes

Jonathan Safran Foer (b. 1977), an American novelist, shaped not only their field but the way we think and talk about identity, creativity, and connection. Beyond his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019), Jonathan Safran Foer proved equally skilled at capturing ideas in a sentence or two. Our collection holds 34 quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer, each offering a different angle on Food, Change, Funny, Family, and Relationship. Here is a taste of their wisdom: "Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?"

“I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Family

All Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Parenting

“I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Family

“I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Food

“Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Faith

“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 able we will be to follow our best instincts.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Family

“There's no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Art

“There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Power

“There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Food

“We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Power

“I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Religion

“My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Fear

“Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Food

“Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Art

“Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Change

“We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Science

“I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Home

“The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Funny

“Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Experience

“Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Car

“When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Change