Quotes from 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.

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.

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?

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.

His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn't just written backward but it's zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.

His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn't just written backward but its zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.

May we all be judged by strangers!

to renew a conflict is to acculturate.

that the bulk of his scholarship was out of my grasp); as

eisegetical;

was this theater or Judaism? Or just an unconscious attempt to bring the cramped city-apartment ambience back to our holidays?

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.

All human language could be determined through this medium, which could not be expressed in any human language, and that was its perfection. The more a thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be. We would equate ourselves with that.

My name is Ruben Blum and I'm an, yes, an historian. But my front-door was locked and I didn't have the key, so I knocked, and as I waited for Edith to let me in, I kept waiving the shovel back at the Sheriff and mumbling, "Turks…what did you expect?…just a bunch of crazy Turks…

His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn't just written backward but its zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.

Our books should be missing something, the finding of which makes us whole.

it can only be distressing to an honest man to witness the ranks of his distinguished profession being infiltrated by Reds who seek to pervert what must be taken as history's purpose, which is the reinforcement of our government and political institutions.

our relations were those of a capital to a colony: diplomatic and vigorously cordial.

He wore his averageness lightly, almost proudly, like a transparent scholar's gown, underneath which he was nakedly an administrator.

In America, however, foreign policy could be determined by popular appeal, through advertising and informational campaigns aimed at the common man who voted.

Someone in Dr. Morse's childhood must've told him that the polite thing to do to get by in the world (in his world) was to memorize one fact and one fact only about each of your colleague's family members, so that when you met that colleague, or met their family members, you could, by mentioning this fact, appear solicitous and engaged.

This, to Netanyahu's mind, was why America was so crucial: it was the only country in the world in which all foreign affairs were primarily domestic; the only country in the world in which—by dint of its immigrant demography and democratic system—the foreign did not exist.

equality ends with the Creation, and that all attempts to enshrine this equality in our government and enforce it through legislation must be treated as abominations to G-d [sic] that verge on Sovietism"…

Philosophy suffers, so suffers History. Psychology, invariably. Russian suffers and History does too, a cosmic Russian suffering. But the worst of it's in the sciences with their laboratory needs. The sciences aren't just expensive, they're greedy. They run their departments as if another war's on.