Words matter. These are the best Joshua Cohen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I’ve never enriched myself via privatization schemes in Eastern Europe.
The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. It is a way to keep writing safe – to keep reading safe from writing.
Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.
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.
Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.
I think if German literature could survive the ’40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.
The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it’s mystic.
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.
The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You know you’re a fool when what you’re doing makes even the post office seem efficient.
