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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Remain
Two
Firsts
First
Things
Time
Irretrievable
Impression

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The ordinary is the divine.
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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.
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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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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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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