Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.

Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, so they use them with care, with thought, with delight.

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

I love words, and I love that there's so many words available to make a point and to create a picture.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

My words itch at your ears till you understand them

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

Good dialogue is very important.

What we ask of music, first and last, is that it communicate experience - experience of all kinds, vital and profound at its greatest, amusing or entertaining at another level.

Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express.