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
teaching character school
Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.
sea ideas doe
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
taken revolution scales
We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.
numbers years age
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
technology literature
Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.
engineering vision
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
travel implicit seeing
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
mistake ideas gossip
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 the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
mind quality influence
It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.
writing acts-of-courage ifs
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.
imagination use imagine
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination
language-and-power kind power-of-language
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
believe writing wonder
It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these "digital products," the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune.
discovery imagination form
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.