Quote

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Cynthia Ozick

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Secondary
Engineering
Vision
Inspirational

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick