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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
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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... 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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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick