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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
Allow
Promise
Reader
Reading
Lying
Compact
Novelist
Promises
Novelists
More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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
The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
... 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
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
Cynthia Ozick
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
Cynthia Ozick
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick