Cynthia Ozick Quotes

The Secular Jew Is A Figment; When A Jew Becomes A Secular Person He Is No Longer A Jew.

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.

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.

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.

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?

No One Can Teach Writing, But Classes May Stimulate The Urge To Write. If You Are Born A Writer, You Will Inevitably And Helplessly Write. A Born Writer Has Self-knowledge. Read, Read, Read. And If You Are A Fiction Writer, Dont Confine Yourself To Reading Fiction. Every Writer Is First A Wide Reader.

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.

Women Who Write With An Overriding Consciousness That They Write As Women Are Engaged Not In Aspiration Toward Writing, But Chiefly In A Politics Of Sex.

All Politicians Know That Every 'temporary' Political Initiative Promised As A Short-term Poultice Stays On The Books Forever.

One Reason Writers Write Is Out Of Revenge. Life Hurts; Certain Ideas And Experiences Hurt; One Wants To Clarify, To Set Out Illuminations, To Replay The Old Bad Scenes And Get The Treppenworte Said -- The Words One Didn't Have The Strength Or Ripeness To Say When Those Words Were Necessary For One's Dignity Or Survival.

Nothing Is So Awesomely Unfamiliar As The Familiar That Discloses Itself At The End Of A Journey. Nothing Shakes The Heart So Much As Meeting-far, Far Away-what You Last Met At Home.

Literature Is An Instrument Of A Culture, Not A Summary Of It.