Joshua Cohen Quotes

Holding a book you're reading is kind of old-school.

My father went to work by train every day. It was half an hour's journey each way, and he would read a paperback in four journeys. After supper, we all sat down to read - it was long before TV, remember!

I don't know where everything is going, but I'm pretty confident that people like books - the objects. So I'm going to go on that -they're not going to disappear.

I do most of my reading on the train ride to and from work. But I always have a book in my handbag so that I can read at any time, anywhere.

Being a pedestrian again is very exciting because in L.A. you live in your car, and you're on a freeway all the time.

If people didn't read books on the subway, underground journeys would be dreary.

As a reader, I read quite widely.

In Paris, the people go in the Metro, they move, they go to their offices, 8 a.m. in the morning - it's like remote control.

I'm always reading books.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.

You sit or stand in the subway, and you look around - I do, because I don't have a phone so I'm not playing a game - and you see people.

People read every thing nowadays, except books.

I was kind of reading you know Judy Blume and stuff like that. But yeah, but I've since educated myself.

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.