Joshua Cohen Quotes

I have an architecture degree; that's what my college degree is in. And that sucked. I started doing Web and CD-ROM development really early on, and then that grew into being an art director and doing advertising work.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

I love films like 'Deliverance' where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

At the end of the day, a television, a computer, or a smart phone is just a device through which one can access content. The content itself is what matters, not the device.

Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we're thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there's a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they're making.

Television's not going read stories to you.

There's not a single business model, and there's not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of them.

Use photos and videos often. The best startups post lots of imagery and videos. The worst ones? Text only.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.

An entire generation of talented people - engineers, artists, scriptwriters, musicians, programmers - have been busy creating a whole new art form for us. The name of this new game is interactivity.

I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film in terms of designing an experience for a screen.

We're an industry obsessed with the storytelling side of things, the content. And then we got obsessed with the canvas. Is it going to be on television? Is it print? And now the canvas is mobile. But what we really need to think about is the context. The context is where and when the person is consuming it - location, time of day.

The iPad is the greatest thing as far as kids.

Netflix, like life, has its pros and cons.

Hypertext makes a virtue out of lack of organization, allowing ideas and thoughts to be juxtaposed at will. [...] The advent of hypertext is apt to make writing much more difficult, not easier. Good writing, that is.

I like to read the ending first.

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

Stop looking at the Web as merely a display opportunity and not a way to interact. That does not create a new business model, it just shifts one that isn't growing and is outdated. The reason sites like Google are stealing advertisers from daily newspapers is not because Google has more eyeballs. It's because Google used the interactivity of the Web to deliver a new, better way to advertise.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing - not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

Mobile is great for us. I think, even though the size of the screen doesn't give everything The New Yorker has to offer, people are spending a lot of time reading - and reading seriously - on the phone.

To understand my feelings — and my conception of the role of Secretary General — the nature of my religious and cultural background must first be understood. I should therefore like to outline not only my beliefs but also my conception of human institutions and of the human situation itself.

In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.