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
Reason
Writing
Revenge
Writers
Write

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Time at length becomes justice.
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
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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
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.
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
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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
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
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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
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
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. 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
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick