Top 100 Ozick Quotes
#1. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#2. The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
#3. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#4. 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
#5. Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
#6. I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.
Cynthia Ozick
#7. To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.
Cynthia Ozick
#8. I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
Cynthia Ozick
#9. In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
Cynthia Ozick
#10. In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
#11. Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.
Cynthia Ozick
#12. No, no, sometimes a person feels to be alone."
"If you're alone too much," Persky said, "you think too much."
"Without a life," Rosa answered, "a person lives where they can. If all they got is thoughts, that's where they live."
"You ain't got a life?"
"Thieves took it.
Cynthia Ozick
#13. What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
Cynthia Ozick
#14. I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.
Cynthia Ozick
#16. Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
Cynthia Ozick
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
#20. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips
Cynthia Ozick
#21. If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.
Cynthia Ozick
#22. What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past
the whole life of a civilization
but also a major share ofthe Jewish future ... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.
Cynthia Ozick
#23. James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life.
Cynthia Ozick
#26. Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.
Cynthia Ozick
#27. To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the world, saying no and no again as they parade by in all their allure. And to be a writer is to plunge into the parade and become one of the delirious marchers.
Cynthia Ozick
#28. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#29. Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.
Cynthia Ozick
#30. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#32. People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.
Cynthia Ozick
#33. Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.
Cynthia Ozick
#34. I think most of my life I have not felt recognized.
Cynthia Ozick
#35. The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
#36. Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One's own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.
Cynthia Ozick
#37. The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
#39. The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.
Cynthia Ozick
#40. I write in terror ... I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.
Cynthia Ozick
#41. The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren't the lords of the earth.
Cynthia Ozick
#42. It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
#43. I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.
Cynthia Ozick
#44. 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
#45. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#46. This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock.
Cynthia Ozick
#47. To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
#48. I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.
Cynthia Ozick
#49. We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
#50. Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.
Cynthia Ozick
#51. 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
#52. Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.
Cynthia Ozick
#53. By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.
Cynthia Ozick
#54. To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Cynthia Ozick
#55. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#56. Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.
Cynthia Ozick
#57. Very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
#58. I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.
Cynthia Ozick
#59. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#60. The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
#61. If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
Cynthia Ozick
#62. Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
#63. In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
#64. Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.
Cynthia Ozick
#65. In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
#66. Lie, illusion, deception, she said
was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?
Cynthia Ozick
#68. I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer.
Cynthia Ozick
#69. The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
#70. We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
#71. 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
#72. The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
Cynthia Ozick
#73. An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.
Cynthia Ozick
#74. All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
Cynthia Ozick
#75. Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
Cynthia Ozick
#77. 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
#78. Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.
Cynthia Ozick
#79. Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
#80. History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
#81. I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.' ... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination.
Cynthia Ozick
#82. The Hebrew Bible has long been the world's possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership, and may not be denied the intimacy of their spiritual claim.
Cynthia Ozick
#83. All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.
Cynthia Ozick
#84. To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
#85. I think it is serious to have good sales. As I learned belatedly, the more you sell, the more publishers pay attention to you, and it took me a very long time to figure that out because I never thought that way.
Cynthia Ozick
#86. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#87. Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.
Cynthia Ozick
#88. With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.
Cynthia Ozick
#90. The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
Cynthia Ozick
#91. Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
#92. The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.
Cynthia Ozick
#93. Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.
Cynthia Ozick
#94. It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.
Cynthia Ozick
#95. It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.
Cynthia Ozick
#96. The novella will be called, I think, "The Messiah of Stockholm." It takes place in Stockholm. I'd better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.
Cynthia Ozick
#97. Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.
Cynthia Ozick
#98. We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.
Cynthia Ozick
#99. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#100. If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.
Cynthia Ozick
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