Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozickis an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 April 1928
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
book fall reading
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
revenge writing reason
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
imagination resources knows
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
doubt
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
passion feelings matter
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
play mad done
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 wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
dedication world form
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.
reading
I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.
advice teeth saws
Old saws have no teeth.
sex women writing
Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.
travel going-away visitors
I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.
mistake legacy impossible
What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.
book forever political
All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.
culture literature instruments
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.