Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

I have never sought the reason why I write.

I wrote 'The Zombie Survival Guide' because I wanted to read it, and nobody else was writing it. All I've been doing with everything I've written is answering questions that I had.

I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.

Never regret what you don't write.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

When I write I'm never really thinking about themes or the universal.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

You write, hoping to write a good book; that's it.

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.