A Quote by Cynthia Ozick

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.

Cynthia Ozick

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American Any Around Become Blender Common Denominator Display Easy Fact Hemingway How Ideology Impossible In Fact Industrial Kind Legacy Less Listen Literary Minute Mistakes More Notice Pandering Pedestrian Pick Pragmatism Prose Put Readers Realism Short Short Story Story Tedious Though Through Transcription Understandable Up Us Vernacular Voice Were Would

Quote Author

Cynthia Ozick
American - Novelist
Born: April 17, 1928

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

Amitava Kumar

God would not make me wish for something impossible and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint. It is impossible for me to grow bigger, so I put up with myself as I am, with all my countless faults. But I will look for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new[...] It is your arms, Jesus, which are the lift to carry me to heaven, And so there is no need for me to grow up. In fact, just the opposite: I must stay little and become less and less.

Thérèse of Lisieux

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.

Katie Kitamura

It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.

Lorin Stein

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass

Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process... When a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information... And readers love it.

Michael Arrington

The only real reason for self-referencing is the fun factor. It's fun for the writer, getting little peeks at what old characters might be up to. And it's fun for readers to spot a familiar face, or pick up on a made-up book title or something from an earlier story. I don't know that it does -- or even should -- contribute to the story in hand being any better than it would have been without it.

Charles de Lint

The fact that the government had to put up hundreds of billions of dollars to Citibank in guarantees was a public declaration that Citibank was a mess. Making Citibank go through financial restructuring would not have conveyed any more different information. So it's very hard to see why it would have had that kind of a panic if it were done well.

Joseph Stiglitz

The fascinating thing about the studio was that there was no story department. They would put a little notice up on the bulletin board saying: 'The next Oswald will take place at the North Pole. Anybody having any gags, please turn them in before such a date.' If you turned in gags regularly, the way Tex Avery, Cal Howard, Jack Carr and two or three others of us did, you'd be called into the gag meeting. The group would go into Walt's office and talk about whatever the subject of the cartoon was. Walt would put it into some kind of form and that was the story--no scripts, no storyboards.

Walter Lantz

Writing for TV or films isn't great art. You have to have a common denominator. It's up to the composer to make that common denominator memorable.

Henry Mancini

I walked around my apartment with food in my mouth asking myself: "How do I come up with this voice?" Then I found the voice. I called the director and said on the phone: "Guess who you're talking to Chris? Sid, that's right Sid!" And that's how I came up with the voice. That's a true story.

John Leguizamo

You would think that growing up in a foreign country would be so easy and fitting in would be a piece of cake, and although my parents were completely liberal and allowed us the opportunity to explore this world, I always felt as though I was searching for people that were more like me.

Shibani Dandekar

How many of you heard the voice of God speak specifically, clearly, directly, and personally, to you? Can you just put a hand up? I'd like you to share it. Can you put a hand up for a minute? Just want you to look around; that's people saying, "God Almighty, the Maker of heaven, the one Who's sitting on the only throne that's not under threat - He spoke to me. He spoke to me." "God spoke to me." Don't let the voice of the darkness tell you that you are not worth that God would not speak to you. Don't let him tell you, you don't matter. God spoke to you.

Louie Giglio

If you take a look at education, the kids that get good grades are said to humiliate those who don't. And what, then, do we do? Slow them down. We put obstacles in their way. We do not devise public education systems that are designed to deal with their superior learning ability. We retard it so that they don't learn any more, any faster than the lowest common denominator - and that really is the nub of it. The Democrats' equality and sameness is all going to be defined by the lowest common denominator.

Rush Limbaugh

Maybe I should be a literary agent. I'm good at picking up on books that become successful before it happens. I could pick up a lot more money than making films.

Lynne Ramsay

I would want to keep that in a little glass sphere, perhaps in the corner of my living room, lit up. But, I think that's an extremely expensive rig. The costumes were crazy expensive, beyond anything they could afford to give you, to take away. They're going to be in a museum of some kind, on display until they get the go for Tron: Legacy 2. It would have been awesome to keep, though. I don't think there was anything that they could afford to let go. I probably would have been arrested.

James Frain

A Quote by Cynthia Ozick

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