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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
Supreme
Distance
Artists
Writer
Sort
Artist
Keep
Competent
Must
Psychological

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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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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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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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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.
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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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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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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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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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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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