Joshua Cohen Quotes

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The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. It is a way to keep writing safe - to keep reading safe from writing.

Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.

The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.

I first read Dostoyevsky when I was 14 years old and was entranced. Dostoyevsky truly is a writer for 14-year-olds, and I mean that in the most approving way - approving of his energy, and rage, his endless pessimism, and endless innocence.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Jekyll & Hyde,' the hero decides on the terms of his transformation in a process that's explained not through the supernatural but the natural or, at least, through biochemistry.

Say you're an American novelist, published by the largest publishing house in the world. Their goal is to make as much money from you as possible, to have as many people read your book in as many formats as possible. How can you hope to speak intimately to the numbers of people that represent the book sales required?

The larger your audience, the smaller your vocabulary and range of referents - the fewer your means of expression. You can't rely on the luxury of intimacy.

I've always been discreet - more than discreet. When a friend calls, and I'm doing something innocuous like cooking dinner, I tell them I'm reading or running out to the movies. It's the surveillance I can't stand.

I've never enriched myself via privatization schemes in Eastern Europe.

I've never been able to shake the idea of family, which is to say I've never been able to shake my family. Being membered - being one limb of an immense grosser body - that's always been a fact to me.

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

'Religion,' I should note, has a disputed etymology in Latin: some say it's from 'relegere,' meaning 'to reread', while others say it's from religare, meaning 'to connect' or 'link.' Literature is life's fastener.

The Internet is a contest between people with the same name to be the person who dominates that online space.

A writer appears in everything that he does. That said, I felt like writing characters with my own name, in fact, provided me with something of a smoke screen.

All technology does is give us back to ourselves. So to be anti-technology in a sense is to be anti-human.

I do think that once you remove the limitations of the page, once you turn text transitive, meaning it can be clicked away from, the forward movement of text can be interrupted. But I don't think this is just a function of technology. It's also a function of cultural preference.

To outsource your memory to machines - which is what many of us do with regard to our use of search engines - seems to me to be fairly antithetical to the basic qualities of Jewish life that have kept the Jews alive for so long.

When knowledge no longer becomes the commodity of the few, but in a sense becomes equalized by everyone having access, you lose some aspect of Jewish particularity, or at least a Jewish particularity that is fundamental to the construct of Jews as people of the book, which was always interesting.

I don't like being victimized by a machine or by other people's demands on my time. I become resentful by feeling forced or incentivized to live a life I don't want to live. That rage in general prevents me from entirely becoming enslaved by technology.

I think that technology is essentially a continuation of a divestment of theological power that's been happening since The Enlightenment. It's the idea that God can see and hear everything.

You know you're a fool when what you're doing makes even the post office seem efficient.

E-books, which made their debut in the 1990s, cut costs even more for both consumer and producer, though as the Internet expanded, those roles became confused.

Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.

The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry's Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon.

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right - as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

The Internet is a tool, a technology, and we like to say that it has all of these properties, but really, it's just a place where our writing is.

I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

The birth of the search engine, it's nothing new: it's essentially embedded in our literature; it's how ideas relate, how the mind makes connections. I mean, connections are made online through links, and within an algorithm, they're made through degrees of relevancy between different terms.

Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate.

The Internet makes the writer work harder - I have to say things here I've never said before, or else be caught out in repeating myself.

Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.

I have a credit card and a phone. I answer emails; I answer questions on chat in the middle of the day. Then, late at night, I write against other people who do just that.

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.

What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.

Books were in my family - books were my family.

What qualified me to write about Israel was that I wanted to; it took no time to convince myself. The only reservation I had was about eaven: I wanted to write about the Jewish heaven but did not feel qualified because I did not and do not believe in 'it,' though I should.

The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it's mystic.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

I don't think any book of mine will ever come as close to pure fantasy as 'A Heaven of Others.' I'll never again set a book in a world or after-world in which it's impossible to buy a cup of coffee or take an undisturbed afternoon nap.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

You write a novel by inventing a world and inventing the rules that govern that world. Then you break the rules when you want to.

All of business and all of politics is essentially fiction to those who live them. I have more experience with fiction than most senators because I do it all day, so their world didn't seem that foreign to me.

Most novelists are narcissistic egomaniacs who would probably fit somewhere on the CEO spectrum.

The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.

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