Quote

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

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
Revenge
Writers
Write
Reason
Writing

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Time heals all things but one: Time.
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
The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.
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
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.
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
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick