Cynthia Ozick Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Cynthia Ozick:

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.

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

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

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

Cynthia Ozick

To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the world, saying no and no again as they parade by in all their allure. And to be a writer is to plunge into the parade and become one of the delirious marchers.

Cynthia Ozick

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.

Cynthia Ozick

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.'

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

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

Cynthia Ozick

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

Cynthia Ozick

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.

Cynthia Ozick

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Cynthia Ozick

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

Cynthia Ozick

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

Cynthia Ozick

Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.

Cynthia Ozick

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

Cynthia Ozick

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.

Cynthia Ozick

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

Cynthia Ozick

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Cynthia Ozick

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

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