Joshua Cohen Quotes

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I feel like every record I've ever made, on some level, is urgent.

The things I do outside of playing the piano are done out of an inner necessity, not just because I want to try my hand at different things.

I love cinema and creating new things, but essentially, I am creating all this because I want people to see it.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

As an artist, you have to do what you feel passionate about. It has to be something you can connect with.

I'm finding writing very fascinating.

Writing is more important than being a writer.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

At a young age, I really wanted to make music and make my own sort of thing. I'm sure if it wasn't music, it would have been writing, or it would have been maybe painting. I just always had the drive to try and make something with my hands and to just pull something out of myself and shape it and see it in front of me, if that makes any sense.

Writing well involves walking the path of most resistance. Sitting still, being patient, allowing the lunatic dream to take shape on the page, then the shaping, the pencil on the page, breathing, slowing down, being willing–no, more than willing, being wide open–to press the bruise until it blossoms.

My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject.