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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don’t – you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess.”

“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.”

“Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“'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.”

“Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.”

“In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialise and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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