189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it...

All politicians know that every ‘temporary’ political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

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

Get thee to the novel! – the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart’s maelstrom.

The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren’t the lords of the earth.

I read in desperate snatches in the interstices of the Quotidian, and dream of finding three uninterrupted quiet hours to think, moon, mentally maunder, and, above all, write. I am pursued by an anti-Muse; her name is Life. Her homely multisyllabic surname is often left unenunciated, but to certain initiates it may be whispered: Exigency.

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

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