Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozickis an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 April 1928
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
children memories childhood
What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
dream want purpose
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
language-and-power kind power-of-language
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
mistake ideas gossip
I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
travel implicit seeing
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
engineering vision
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
imagination use imagine
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination
writing acts-of-courage ifs
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.
numbers years age
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
passion feelings matter
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
book fall reading
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
cousin uncles book
A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?
art character writing
The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
animal careers use
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.