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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

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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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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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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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.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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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.
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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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Time at length becomes justice.
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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.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
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In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
Cynthia Ozick
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick