Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Writers
Distortion
Large
Imaginative
Fakery
Habit
Crew
Insinuation
Wind
Habits
Shifty
Memories
Observation
Imposture
Invention
Misrepresentation
Memory
Sunk
Illusion
Observations

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
... 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
Image
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
Image
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick