Cynthia Ozick Quotes
63 quotes
in 880 categories
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination
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I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that…
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Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
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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…
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The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a…
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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…
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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…
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I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
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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…
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Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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