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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
Novelists
Allow
Promise
Reader
Reading
Lying
Compact
Novelist
Promises

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick