Cynthia Ozick Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.”

“The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.”