People hurt each other. That’s what people do.
We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.
I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change – which lasted a couple of weeks – was based on the very simple instinct that it’s wrong to kill animals for food.
Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?
I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
I’ve never particularly liked bankers.
I’m not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I’ll be funny in real life. It’s the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
I need an office, so I can have a place where I don’t write.
For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.
Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Profound, bottomless self-doubt – it has no value – what’s the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else.
How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.
Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.