Jonathan Safran Foer

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.

It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

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

I've never particularly liked bankers.

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?

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

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

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.

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