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
mean writing thinking
If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?
proudest trust
I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.
flows middle three
I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway,
recognition worthy judged
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
attention figure good learned pay publishers serious time took
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.
alice among believe gordon hugely john masters philip
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.
teaching character school
Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.
absence afraid courageous roth
I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There's nothing he's afraid to say.
mistake legacy impossible
What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.
human
All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
technology literature
Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.
doubt
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
writing humanity
Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.
accompany critical felt imperative kafka mistaken neither ought whoever
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.