Quotes from Joshua Cohen

the generations broken, the family broken, to be repaired like a dropped pot or snarled ark of reeds, that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot, in plopping myself in creaky unreclinable chairs around tables of prickly leaves to commiserate through recitation: flight into Egypt, plagues, flight out of Egypt, desert and plagues—a travail so repeated without manumission that it becomes its own travail, and so the tradition is earned.

two books besides the Koran. I'd noticed when heading beachward—copies are given away in the lobby for gratis. I want to hoard heaps of these, cairns and dolmens of these—I want to die in this facility wrapped in a rabbinic beard as quilly soft as this duvet so that when Security (dial 0) slams down the door I'll be buried under this monument: 1,001 Korans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

'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.

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

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right - as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet.

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

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

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.