Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• With writing, we have second chances.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Second Chance, Chance

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.144, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Let love write on you for awhile.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.243, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Running, Song, Writing

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Boots, Letters

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Darling, You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. Your father

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Father, Love You, Writing

• Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Smart, Loneliness, Writing

• ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Art, Writing, Successful

• I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Space, Bars

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.176, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Boys, Men

• Only a few months into our marriage," writes the grandfather, "we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Grandfather, Would Be

• He was not such a special person. He loved to read very much, and also to write. He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Silly, Writing, People

• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Dark, Light

• Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Book, Writing, Animal

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

• A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Home, Writing, Son

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, March 4, 2010.

• I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Running, Hurt, Laughter

• The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Ideas, Important

• I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Heart, Joy

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.109, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Distance, Loneliness, Book

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

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Editing, Self

  "Foer play" by Clark Collis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

• Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Art, Writing, Criticism

• I think it's a greater risk not to write about 9\11. If you're in my position - a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about - I think it's risky to avoid what's right in front of you.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Thinking, Risk

• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Block, Writing, Two

• 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?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Jobs, Fun, Moving

  Interview with Joshua Wolf Shenk, www.motherjones.com. May 2005.

• 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

  Coffee, Home, Writing

  Interview with Joshua Wolf Shenk, www.motherjones.com. May 2005.

• I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Interview with Joshua Wolf Shenk, www.motherjones.com. May 2005.

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