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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
Keep
Competent
Must
Psychological
Supreme
Distance
Artists
Writer
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Artist

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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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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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 power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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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