You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.
Jonathan Safran FoerBut when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.
Jonathan Safran FoerI felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
Jonathan Safran FoerThe more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
Jonathan Safran Foer