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
bellow henry himself james twenties
I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.
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I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.
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My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.
henry
There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.
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Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
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Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.
sacred
The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.
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Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
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In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
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An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.
last outcome paragraph pleasure pocket rarely
In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.
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A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.
fanaticism marry nobody
I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer.
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I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There's nothing he's afraid to say.