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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Reader
Reading
Lying
Compact
Novelist
Promises
Novelists
Allow
Promise

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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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 imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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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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Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
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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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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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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick