Cynthia Ozick Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer.”

“All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.”

“I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.”

“Literature is for the sake of humanity.”

“With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.”

“Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.”

“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.”