Cynthia Ozick quotes

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. (Cynthia Ozick)

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

Cynthia Ozick

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

Cynthia Ozick

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Cynthia Ozick

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Cynthia Ozick

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

Cynthia Ozick

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

Cynthia Ozick

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

Cynthia Ozick

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.

Cynthia Ozick

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.

Cynthia Ozick

The engineering is secondary to the vision. (Cynthia Ozick)

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

Cynthia Ozick

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Cynthia Ozick

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Cynthia Ozick

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

Cynthia Ozick

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, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Cynthia Ozick

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

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

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.

Cynthia Ozick