189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.

If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

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

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.

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.