Latest Cynthia Ozick Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Doubt, Unchanging, Feels

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Believe, Writing, Magazines

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Technology, Literature

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Pieces, Recognition, Worthy

• 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