“What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.”

American novelist

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and writer. He is associated with contemporary American fiction and has 239 quotes on the site. He is known for the novels Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Here I Am, as well as the non-fiction works Eating Animals and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. He also teaches creative writing at New York University. His writing often moves between fiction and nonfiction, with attention to family, memory, and environmental concern.