Joshua Cohen Quotes - 9quotes.com

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.
Written by Joshua Cohen
Books were in my family - books were my family.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
Most novelists are narcissistic egomaniacs who would probably fit somewhere on the CEO spectrum.
Written by Joshua Cohen
The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.
Written by 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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.
Written by Joshua Cohen
The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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?
Written by Joshua Cohen
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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
I've never enriched myself via privatization schemes in Eastern Europe.
Written by Joshua Cohen
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.
Written by Joshua Cohen
Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.
Written by Joshua Cohen

Join our feeds to automatically receive the latest headlines, news, and information formatted for your club's website or news reader.

Social connect: