I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.

The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don't care, or can't care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, "Are you an environmentalist or not?" The question doesn't make any sense.

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?

There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.