Quote

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

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
Dream
Life
Purpose

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts certain ideas and experiences hurt one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
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
Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick