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
Done
Mad
Polished
Bitter
Draft
Wrote
Rehearsal
Letters
Agent
Room
Letter
Rooms
Crafts
Call
Agents
Drafts
Play
Turning
Referred

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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.
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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.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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... woman is frequently praised as the more creative sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick