Cynthia Ozick Quotes (15 Quotes)

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

The usefulness of madmen is famous they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

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.

I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There's nothing he's afraid to say.

Wondrous hole Magical hole Dazzlingly influential hole Noble and effulgent hole From this hole everything follows logically first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.

The prolific generosity of Dylan's talent down the years has been a wonder to behold. Industry... is itself the artist's portion, ... There is no question that quantity - added, of course, to genius - is what separates major writers from minor ones.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.

I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway,

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called scientific mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers they are gossips.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, ... then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature.