Top 133 Quotes & Sayings by Cynthia Ozick - Page 3

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

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?

I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.

a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

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.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.