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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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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
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The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.
Cynthia Ozick
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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
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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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
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick