Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.Collection: Imagination
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.Collection: Pieces
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.Collection: History
Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.Collection: Abuse
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.Collection: Civilization
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.Collection: Listening
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.Collection: Eye
Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.Collection: Life
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.Collection: Lying
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.Collection: Real
Old saws have no teeth.Collection: Advice
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.Collection: Doubt
One reason writers write is out of revenge.Collection: Revenge
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: War
... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.Collection: Baby
The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.Collection: Figments
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Mistake
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?Collection: Writing
We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.Collection: Sorrow
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.Collection: Book
It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.Collection: Mind
Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.Collection: Technology
Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Discovery
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.Collection: Play
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.Collection: Passion
Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Firsts
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk – a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.Collection: Reading