Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.

The Torah, the Jewish holy book, requires Jews to demonstrate their joy by eating pastries mixed with human blood.

There is a biblical injunction to tell your children, but the sages who created the Seder several thousand years ago understood that it had to be more than just speaking: that in order for something to connect so emotionally in human beings, it had to be relived.

We have to be a nation of compassion and some sort of humanity when it comes to the treatment of other human beings.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.

I didn't survive because I was stronger than others. I survived because my family and friends helped me to survive. They took my place. My job is to give them back their dignity, tell their story, and say their names.

We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.

Fair treatment of human beings and animals in many different realms strikes a chord with me.

I love art, but I'm also interested in people's stories.

It's like one of the best things that can ever happen to you as an actor: to have your story reach people, even if they don't look like you and even though they may not be able to identify with a black male; they can still identify with what's happening to you.

I've always been interested in listening to people's stories.

There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.

Maintaining the dignity of my subjects has grown to be, over the years, an imperative in my work, both in the taking of the pictures and in their presentation.

My brothers were rabbis. My grandfather was a rabbi.

Whatever I talk about onstage is just my story. My fan base is broad... We all have the same mom; it's just that ours has an accent.

My roots are documentaries.

It's great to have loads of Marvel movies, but the movies that reflect our lives - that's why I came to the movies, and that's what I love. I want to see stories about my life being reflected back at me, and there's not that many of those anymore. It's a real shame.

The U.S. is a rainbow of people with an endless scope of stories. My hope is that writing stories about people of color will become instinctual rather than something to be pushed for.

The writing process for us is different with every song. Sometimes they come from our lives, or someone else we know may be going through something that we choose to write about.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

When someone steals a person's clothes, we call him a thief. Should we not also give the same name to the one who could clothe the naked but does not?

Compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery - encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.