Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Idea
Vacuums
Language
Vacuum
Doe
Invent
Ideas
Sail
Slant
Firsts
Fabric
Fins
First
Lifts
Invents
Sea
Cadence
Fiction
Sails

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
... 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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts certain ideas and experiences hurt one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick