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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
First
Lifts
Invents
Sea
Cadence
Fiction
Sails
Idea
Vacuums
Language
Vacuum
Doe
Invent
Ideas
Sail
Slant
Firsts
Fabric
Fins
More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
Cynthia Ozick
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
Cynthia Ozick
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Cynthia Ozick
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick