Cynthia Ozick
Novelist
1928-04-17
Books by Cynthia Ozick
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The pagan rabbi, and other stories
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The shawl
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Quotes by Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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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.
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Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
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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.
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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.
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The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.
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Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?
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I notice no interplay of life and art. Life is that which-pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially-interrupts.
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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
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What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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