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
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
“The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a… — 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
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of… — 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… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably… — 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
I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the… — 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
Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question.… — 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
