189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

If I've ever regretted anything, it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would've been the intelligent thing to do, but I didn't, and that was because of fanaticism.

I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There's nothing he's afraid to say.

I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.

I think most of my life I have not felt recognized.

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.

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

We carry it with us and it goes in and out.

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.