Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Read full biography of Cynthia Ozick →
Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York... →
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on... →
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... →
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... →
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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... →
I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and... →
People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question.... →
I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I... →
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... →
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... →
The Hebrew Bible has long been the world's possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership... →
All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist.