Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

About Cynthia Ozick:

Cynthia Ozick is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.

Cynthia Ozick

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

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

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

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

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 p...

Cynthia Ozick

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

Cynthia Ozick

I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably ...

Cynthia Ozick

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, don't confine yourself to ...

Cynthia Ozick

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

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out ...

Cynthia Ozick

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 d...

Cynthia Ozick

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

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

Cynthia Ozick

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

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Cynthia Ozick

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Cynthia Ozick

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

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

Cynthia Ozick

Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.

Cynthia Ozick

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

Author Bio

  • NameCynthia Ozick
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornApril 17, 1928
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Humanities Medal