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.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

All technology does is give us back to ourselves. So to be anti-technology in a sense is to be anti-human.

Books were in my family - books were my family.

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

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

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

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

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

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

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

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

The Internet is a tool, a technology, and we like to say that it has all of these properties, but really, it's just a place where our writing is.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.

Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.

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

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.

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.

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.

E-books, which made their debut in the 1990s, cut costs even more for both consumer and producer, though as the Internet expanded, those roles became confused.