Cynthia Ozick

“Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.”

“In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.”

“All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.”

“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.”

“Literature is for the sake of humanity.”

“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.”

“Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.”

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

“In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.”

“To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'”

“The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.”

“An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.”

“After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.”

“I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.”

“People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.”

“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.”

“Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.”

“In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.”

“I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.”

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