What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.
From Joshua Cohen
Books were in my family - books were my family.
The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it's mystic.
Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most novelists are narcissistic egomaniacs who would probably fit somewhere on the CEO spectrum.
The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives