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" I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel. "
Cynthia Ozick
God
Never
Faith
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life. "
Cynthia Ozick
Life
Moral
Literature
" I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives. "
Cynthia Ozick
Me
You
Think
" To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.' "
Cynthia Ozick
Language
Imagination
Say
" 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
" 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
" Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. "
Cynthia Ozick
Travel
Implicit
Traveling
" Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way. "
Cynthia Ozick
Good
Alone
Early
" 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'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
" The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment. "
Cynthia Ozick
Society
Jewish
Consequences
" The engineering is secondary to the vision. "
Cynthia Ozick
Engineering
Vision
Secondary
" After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. "
Cynthia Ozick
Years
After
Become
" Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! "
Cynthia Ozick
Profound
Look
Space
" Literature is for the sake of humanity. "
Cynthia Ozick
Sake
Humanity
Literature
" I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing. "
Cynthia Ozick
Order
Writing
Write
" I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement. "
Cynthia Ozick
Height
Far
Back
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Cynthia Ozick
Chance
Books
Life
" I think most of my life I have not felt recognized. "
Cynthia Ozick
My Life
Think
Recognized
" People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology. "
Cynthia Ozick
Culture
I Can
People
" If I've ever regretted anything, it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would've been the intelligent thing to do, but I didn't, and that was because of fanaticism. "
Cynthia Ozick
Trying
Literature
Intelligent
" 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
" In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities. "
Cynthia Ozick
Society
Gone
Distance
" 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