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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
Artist
Keep
Competent
Must
Psychological
Supreme
Distance
Artists
Writer
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More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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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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.
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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.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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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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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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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The ordinary is the divine.
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