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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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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Memories
Observation
Imposture
Invention
Misrepresentation
Memory
Sunk
Illusion
Observations
Writers
Distortion
Large
Imaginative
Fakery
Habit
Crew
Insinuation
Wind
Habits
Shifty
More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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
The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.
Cynthia Ozick
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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
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
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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