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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.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Fiction
State
Disenchanted
Reading
Drawn
Read
Current
History
Claim
Littles
Mostly
States
Currents
Little
Claims

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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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.
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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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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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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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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
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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick