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" All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. "
Cynthia Ozick
Writing
Being
Human
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" In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better. "
Cynthia Ozick
Choose
Better
Saying
" Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. "
Cynthia Ozick
Sea
Business
Death
" 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
Think
Hand
You
" Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. "
Cynthia Ozick
Emotions
Poet
Intellect
" The engineering is secondary to the vision. "
Cynthia Ozick
Engineering
Vision
Secondary
" A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe. "
Cynthia Ozick
Mood
Character
America
" I think it is serious to have good sales. As I learned belatedly, the more you sell, the more publishers pay attention to you, and it took me a very long time to figure that out because I never thought that way. "
Cynthia Ozick
Me
Think
Long
" If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. "
Cynthia Ozick
Opportunity
Will
Effort
" 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, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader. "
Cynthia Ozick
Born
Reading
Writing
" When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes. "
Cynthia Ozick
Hero
Politics
Relationship
" Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! "
Cynthia Ozick
Profound
Look
Space
" The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. "
Cynthia Ozick
Sacred
Intuition
Interrogation
" With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life. "
Cynthia Ozick
Life
Moral
Literature
" Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful. "
Cynthia Ozick
Believe
Voice
Our
" I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha! "
Cynthia Ozick
Story
I Am
Writing
" I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing. "
Cynthia Ozick
Order
Writing
Write
" Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. "
Cynthia Ozick
America
Language
Puritans
" I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it. "
Cynthia Ozick
Result
See
Lost
" I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did. "
Cynthia Ozick
Late
Writer
Idea
" The Hebrew Bible has long been the world's possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership, and may not be denied the intimacy of their spiritual claim. "
Cynthia Ozick
Bible
Language
World
" To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the world, saying no and no again as they parade by in all their allure. And to be a writer is to plunge into the parade and become one of the delirious marchers. "
Cynthia Ozick
Act
World
Saying
" In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it. "
Cynthia Ozick
You
Discovery
Journey
" I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination. "
Cynthia Ozick
Think
Imagination
Small
" I think most of my life I have not felt recognized. "
Cynthia Ozick
My Life
Think
Recognized
" 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. "
Cynthia Ozick
Career
Born
Animal
" Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque. "
Cynthia Ozick
Felt
Mistaken
Impress
" An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. "
Cynthia Ozick
Years
Aura
Birth
" I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since. "
Cynthia Ozick
Trust
First
Energy
" An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. "
Cynthia Ozick
Trust
Free
Mind
" Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. "
Cynthia Ozick
You
Writing
Way