Cynthia Ozick Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Thinking, One Day, Done

  Cynthia Ozick (1983). “Art & ardor: essays”, Alfred A. Knopf

  4 Copy quote

• very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Keys, Piano, Teeth

  Cynthia Ozick (2009). “Dictation: A Quartet”, p.65, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Kings, Teaching, School

  "What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. July 16, 2016.

  10 Copy quote

• The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Art, Writing, Character

  7 Copy quote

• The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Discovery, Imagination, Form

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Sea, Ideas, Vacuums

  Cynthia Ozick (2006). “The Din in the Head”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Book, Fall, Reading

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “A Cynthia Ozick Reader”, p.305, Indiana University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Christian, Brother, Caves

  5 Copy quote

• To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Distance, Artist, Psychological

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “A Cynthia Ozick Reader”, p.278, Indiana University Press

  5 Copy quote

• Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Memories, Wind, Illusion

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character: And Other Essays on Writing”

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Play, Mad, Done

  5 Copy quote

• There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Discovery, Firsts, Encounters

  8 Copy quote

• I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Order, Obsession

  5 Copy quote

• 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 in condo and suburb.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Class, America, Alive

  Cynthia Ozick (1987). “The Messiah of Stockholm: a novel”, Alfred A. Knopf

  7 Copy quote

• Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Passion, Feelings, Matter

  13 Copy quote

• I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Animal, Careers, Use

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character: And Other Essays on Writing”

  10 Copy quote

• Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Humanity, Sides

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Mistake, Voice, Less Is More

  "What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. July 16, 2016.

  7 Copy quote

• 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?

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  5 Copy quote

• It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Cynthia Ozick (2004). “Trust: A Novel”, p.58, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Technology, Literature

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Mind, Quality, Influence

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Spring, Reality, Comedy

  Cynthia Ozick (1983). “Art & ardor: essays”, Alfred A. Knopf

  4 Copy quote

• We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Sorrow, Shapes, Way

  Cynthia Ozick (2017). “Art and Ardor”, p.258, Atlantic Books

  5 Copy quote

• a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Book, People, Literature

  Cynthia Ozick (1966). “Trust”

  15 Copy quote

Page 3 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin