If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
“The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh . The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk . Leave it to the Germans… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion,… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
