Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Read full biography of Cynthia Ozick →
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... →
To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the world, saying no and no again as they parade... →
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... →
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... →
I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having... →
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... →
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal... →
If I've ever regretted anything, it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going... →
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... →
Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that... →
Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist.