Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Old saws have no teeth.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

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.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.

To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

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.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

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

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.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

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.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

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

The ordinary is the divine.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

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

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

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

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.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

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.

very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.