American - Novelist | April 17, 1928 -
I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha!
Cynthia Ozick
I AmMistakePeopleMeWritingKnow
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
YourselfWritingReadingYouBorn
There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.
HateInfluenceWishSayDeadI Wish
When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.
RelationshipHeroPoliticsThought
An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.
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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.
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Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.
LoveBusinessSeaDeathPeopleGo
I think most of my life I have not felt recognized.
LifeThinkMy LifeMostI Think
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.
GoodTimeMeThinkThoughtYou
With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.
LifeLiteratureMoralExceptions
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.
SocietyConsequencesWillJewish
Literature is for the sake of humanity.
LiteratureHumanitySake
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