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" I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer. "
Cynthia Ozick
Nobody
Long
Think
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" Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. "
Cynthia Ozick
Emotions
Poet
Intellect
" After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. "
Cynthia Ozick
Years
After
Become
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. "
Cynthia Ozick
Writing
Being
Human
" Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! "
Cynthia Ozick
Profound
Look
Space
" I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing. "
Cynthia Ozick
Order
Writing
Write
" 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
" 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
" 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
" My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life. "
Cynthia Ozick
Home
Life
My Life
" In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better. "
Cynthia Ozick
Choose
Better
Saying
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The engineering is secondary to the vision. "
Cynthia Ozick
Engineering
Vision
Secondary
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. "
Cynthia Ozick
Sacred
Intuition
Interrogation
" 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
" Literature is for the sake of humanity. "
Cynthia Ozick
Sake
Humanity
Literature