Quotes from Joshua Cohen

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

my generation's screwed—we're not the immigrant experience, we're not the assimilation experience—we're the first nothing generation, we've got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.

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.

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

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

But the for serious offline impact of 09/11 was the continual contact, continuous contact, it encouraged. On 09/12 everyone went out and bought phones. The mobiles, the cells. Suddenly, to lose touch was to die, and the only prayer left for anyone who felt buried whether under information or debris was for a signal strong enough to let their last words outlive them on voicemail.

and yet the fact remains that the youth today is more sensitive than ever. I admit I don't know how to understand this phenomenon and have sought to approach it "economically," asking the question of whether an increase in sensitivity has brought about a decrease in discrimination, or whether a decrease in discrimination has brought about an increase in sensitivity to when, where, and how it occurs.

No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I'm convinced.

Music laps at the shores of the intellect; only those with no firm ground under their feet can live for music. — Karl Kraus

The wife said, "That's what it said in the pamphlet: follow in the footsteps of Jesus—but it didn't say how many steps.

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.

All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

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.

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.

A whole roasted lamb—stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved—was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs

A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th—this was Tetration's NY HQ. I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?

The only thing worse than an Aussie or Kiwi intonation is its intermittent use. When it's Auckland talking, or Melbourne, fine. But when a snatch of downunder drawl erupts from the mouth of a Euro, it's like blood in your urine.

Women, because what are they worth? Men, because what are they worth? Music, because what is it worth? and, more importantly with music, what exactly is the it?

Let this meeting be as cryptic—as representative/nonrepresentative—as the Arameans, a people that never had a land of their own but still managed to leave behind their language—the only thing they left behind, their language. Aramaic. Ha lachma anya. This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn't Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?