Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

Death persecutes before it executes.

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.

Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

Old saws have no teeth.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts stamped imprinted eternally seen.

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

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.

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

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