Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.

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.

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?

When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at?

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.

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.

As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

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

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.

I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.

There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.

The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.

There is no greater gift than time.