189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway,

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.

The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.

If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, ... then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature.

I think it is serious to have good sales. As I learned belatedly, the more you sell, the more publishers pay attention to you, and it took me a very long time to figure that out because I never thought that way.

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.

I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer.