One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to. Cynthia Ozick More Quotes by Cynthia Ozick More Quotes From Cynthia Ozick Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards. Cynthia Ozick caves brother christian The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself. Cynthia Ozick trouble happiness ... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. Cynthia Ozick baby sex art Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English. Cynthia Ozick humanity sides writing 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? Cynthia Ozick writing mean thinking 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 less-is-more voice mistake I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history. Cynthia Ozick reading littles fiction What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope. Cynthia Ozick unchanging doubt feels Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication. Cynthia Ozick recognition pieces worthy Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature. Cynthia Ozick technology literature It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself. Cynthia Ozick quality influence mind It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these "digital products," the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune. Cynthia Ozick magazines writing believe I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it. Cynthia Ozick dead result you punishment Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! Cynthia Ozick small look space matter 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. Cynthia Ozick any impress felt approach Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. Cynthia Ozick out language america past Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. Cynthia Ozick wait you sometimes way 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 me you candle sun 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 saying become mind world 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 never born faith god
