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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
Writer
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Artist
Keep
Competent
Must
Psychological
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Distance
Artists

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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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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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick