When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
There are a lot of things that we crave, there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to.
We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.
The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
What the world does not need is a Haggadah that pats itself on the back. It needs a Haggadah that gets out of the way, that starts a conversation and gets out of the way.
It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.
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.
For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.
It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.
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.
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.
My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.
There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
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.
People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.
I've never particularly liked bankers.
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.
It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.
I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally, the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics.
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.
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.
Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.
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.
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.
Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
People don't care enough. They don't get worked up enough. They don't get angry enough. They don't get passionate enough. I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.
I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.
There is no greater gift than time.
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.
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.
Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
