Joshua Cohen Quotes

The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart.

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.

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.

But death on the page is just a typo, I said: You can't say for example, She is dead–"she" no longer is. You can't say for example, She was dead–death itself, a condition coterminous with eternity, renders the past tense inaccurate.

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.

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.

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.

All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

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

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

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

in seeking only to stay upright, you fall, are banished then cursed and reviled, condemned to wander a continent you don't even know where you're going, only when you're expected, which is every Friday at sundown though your calendars were never coordinated and what you always thought had been west was really only a left turn taken with your back to the north, in haste and with little sleep, then upon your forehead, the development of a worrying mark.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father's dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn't allowed to walk alone when younger - so young that my concern wasn't the danger to myself but to the books I'd bring, because they weren't mine, they were everyone's, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.

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.

Art that samples other art, quotes that quote other quotes--your writer knows this phenomenon, in jargon 'he's aware', he was raised in a culture of (not more ironic jargon, select only the most appropriate gustatory analogy): regurgitation, a culture of glutting to vomit and glutting again on the vomit until reemesis--chunky cheese mimesis--then licking that puddle again.

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

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.

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?

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.

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I'd be allowed to decide anything at all.

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

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.