Cynthia Ozick Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Figments, Jew, Secular

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

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• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Reading, Fiction, Littles

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• 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.

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• 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

• 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

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• 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

• 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

• Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Technology, Literature

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• 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”

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

  Cynthia Ozick

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

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• 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

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• 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”

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• 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

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

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Order, Obsession

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Cynthia Ozick

  Passion, Feelings, Matter

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• 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

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