The Foer Container

“As a writer, you collect things ... Before I was a writer, I passed through the world like a sieve ... Being a writer is like making yourself into a container … When you write, you rearrange all of the sounds and images you have created.”

- Jonathan Safran Foer, at Cornell

(He also said, and we have no way of knowing how serious he was, that to prime himself to write, he used to “listen to Dolly Parton’s 'I Will Always Love You'… It put me in the place.”)