Cynthia Ozick Quotes

63 quotes in 880 categories

• It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
• To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
• Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.
• The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
• To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination
• I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that…
• Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
• When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an…
• The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
• The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
• Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a…
• I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of…
• One reason writers write is out of revenge.
• The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
• Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
• I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I…
• I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
• Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well…
• Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.
• In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

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