A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
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
I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! -… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. — 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
