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
disease resentment should
Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.
mean writing thinking
If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?
care doe cry
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
habit status-quo reverence
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
truth hate useless
It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.
writing humanity
Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.
distance artist psychological
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
ambition writing order
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
war causes consciousness
Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.
writing secret lines
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.
lasts logic madness
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
hurt revenge writing
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
lying reading promise
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
book second-chance next
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.