Quotes from Cynthia Ozick

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

I write in terror...I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.

Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves, unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens. Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. [...] Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw.

Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One's own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.

James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life.

People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips

It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

I work from a different theory. For everything there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.

The novella will be called, I think, "The Messiah of Stockholm." It takes place in Stockholm. I'd better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock.

Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past.

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh . The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk . Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe.

She thought: How hard it is to change one's life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.

You can never tell how genes ricochet.

Brilliant students make good aides.

Así que es a eso que se encamina la nueva generación de lectores: hacia esa perdición que es el egotismo y las pretensiones de superiodad moralizadora y politizada?

I think it is serious to have good sales. As I learned belatedly, the more you sell, the more publishers pay attention to you, and it took me a very long time to figure that out because I never thought that way.

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.

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

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

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.