189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

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.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.