Jonathan Safran Foer
We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.Collection: Lying
The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.Collection: Writing
He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Mean
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.Collection: Hands
We tried so hard. We were always trying to help each other. But not because we were helpless. He needed to get things for me, just as I needed to get things for him. It gave us purpose. Sometimes I would ask him for something that I did not even want, just to let him get it for me. We spent our days trying to help each other help each other. I would get his slippers. He would make my tea. I would turn up the heat so he could turn up the air conditioner so I could turn up the heat.Collection: Air
We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.Collection: Imagine
Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.Collection: Mean
My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.Collection: Lonely
[Grandfather] would manufacture funnies with Grandmother before she died about how he was in love with other women who were not her. She knew it was only funnies because she would laugh in volumes. 'Anna,' he would say, 'I am going to marry that one with the pink hat.' And she would say, 'To whom are you going to marry her?' And he would say, 'To me.' I would laugh very much in the back seat, and she would say to him, 'But you are no priest.' And he would say, 'I am today.' And she would say, 'Today you believe in God?' And he would say, 'Today I believe in love.Collection: Believe
I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?Collection: Islands
Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.Collection: Regret
My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.Collection: Stories
Writing’s funny, it’s like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you’ve written.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Reading
My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations – or even worse, somebody else’s?Collection: Fun