Joshua Cohen Quotes

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

Joshua Cohen

#2. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#3. Principal's no different from the rest - he orders and so he is.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#5. NYers are cruel enough to neglect a bond due only to trackwork on the L.

Joshua Cohen

#6. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#7. If you're reading this on a screen, fuck off. I'll only talk if I'm gripped with both hands.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#9. my generation's screwed - we're not the immigrant experience, we're not the assimilation experience - we're the first nothing generation, we've got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#12. The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.

Joshua Cohen

#13. It was only in Palo Alto that I searched "Rachav Binder" and "Rach Binder," got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church's databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#15. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#16. 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.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#18. No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I'm convinced.

Joshua Cohen

#19. 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.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#21. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#22. Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

Joshua Cohen

#23. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#24. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#25. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#26. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#27. Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.

Joshua Cohen

#28. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#29. What's privacy to the employee is security to the boss.

Joshua Cohen

#30. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#31. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#32. A whole roasted lamb - stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved - was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs,

Joshua Cohen

#33. As for yours truly, I've been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up - with my employer's technology - myself, and Rach.

Joshua Cohen

#34. 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.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#36. The chips were the enablers, limited pellets of silicon that served an apparently unlimited range of functions, as like a single snackfood delivering the tastes of chocolate, vanilla, pork rind, popcorn, pretzel, and chip in every bitesized bite.

Joshua Cohen

#37. All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.

Joshua Cohen

#38. A people's legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn't a relationship unless it's left behind its trash.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#40. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#41. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#42. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#43. Imagine taking home this beautiful young paleskinned blackhaired late-model Jewess. Into fitness, healthy living. Raised good in better Yonkers. Mother a Hebrew School teacher, which means for her a traditional education.

Joshua Cohen

#44. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#45. Death is the only monopoly. Nothing can compete.

Joshua Cohen

#46. '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.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#48. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#49. Books were in my family - books were my family.

Joshua Cohen

#50. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#51. 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.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#53. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#54. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#55. By the highway, the Hudson - the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy.

Joshua Cohen

#56. All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

Joshua Cohen

#57. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#58. How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#60. Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning's identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified - located elsewhere.

Joshua Cohen

#61. I have what's called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

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

Joshua Cohen

#64. 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.

Joshua Cohen

#65. Congress was just a gray repository that got its OS replaced with each election.

Joshua Cohen