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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Must
Psychological
Supreme
Distance
Artists
Writer
Sort
Artist
Keep
Competent

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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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.
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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.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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.
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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.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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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.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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