Quote

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

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Bitter
Draft
Wrote
Rehearsal
Letters
Agent
Room
Letter
Rooms
Crafts
Call
Agents
Drafts
Play
Turning
Referred
Done
Mad
Polished

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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.
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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
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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
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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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.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Cynthia Ozick