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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Joshua Cohen Quotes

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

– Joshua Cohen

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

– Joshua Cohen

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?

– Joshua Cohen

Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.

– Joshua Cohen

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

Books were in my family – books were my family.

– Joshua Cohen

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

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

– Joshua Cohen

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

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.

– Joshua Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

– Joshua Cohen

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

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

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

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

– Joshua Cohen

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

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

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

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

– Joshua Cohen

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

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

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