Cynthia Ozick - Writer 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
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said — the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Cynthia Ozick
A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy—writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

Cynthia Ozick
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self; a writer's lessons are ineluctably internal.

Cynthia Ozick
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Cynthia Ozick
A writer is someone born with a gift. An athlete can run. A painter can paint. A writer has a facility with words. A good writer can also think.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be—not to have a "career," but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

Cynthia Ozick