Cynthia Ozick - Language Quotes

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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

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

Cynthia Ozick

Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.

Cynthia Ozick