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A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

-Cynthia Ozick

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A Writer Is Dreamed

Cynthia Ozick

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A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

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Life Is That Which - Pressingly, Persistently, Unfailingly, Imperially - Interrupts.

Travelers Are Fantasists, Conjurers, Seers - And What They Finally Discover Is That Every Round Object Everywhere Is A Crystal Ball: Stone, Teapot, The Marvelous Globe Of The Human Eye.

The Imagination Is A Species Of Knowledge, Knowledge That Can Take The Form Of Discovery.

In The Compact Between Novelist And Reader, The Novelist Promises To Lie, And The Reader Promises To Allow It.

Every Writer Aspires To Recognition , And It Comes Entirely Privately, Without Public Fanfare, Each Time A Piece Of Work Is Judged Worthy Of Publication.

One Reason Writers Write Is Out Of Revenge. Life Hurts; Certain Ideas And Experiences Hurt; One Wants To Clarify, To Set Out Illuminations, To Replay The Old Bad Scenes And Get The Treppenworte Said -- The Words One Didn't Have The Strength Or Ripeness To Say When Those Words Were Necessary For One's Dignity Or Survival.

Whoever Mourns The Dead Mourns Himself.

Time At Length Becomes Justice.

I'm Not Afraid Of Facts, I Welcome Facts But A Congeries Of Facts Is Not Equivalent To An Idea. This Is The Essential Fallacy Of The So-called "scientific" Mind. People Who Mistake Facts For Ideas Are Incomplete Thinkers; They Are Gossips.

Is There A Word More Passionate Than Passion? Obsession, Total Immersion, The Feeling That Everything Else Doesn't Matter.

The Usefulness Of Madmen Is Famous: They Demonstrate Society's Logic Flagrantly Carried Out Down To Its Last Scrimshaw Scrap.

To Want To Be What One Can Be Is Purpose In Life.

Traveling Is Seeing; It Is The Implicit That We Travel By.

What Was Lost In The European Cataclysm Was Not Only The Jewish Past--the Whole Life Of A Civilization--but Also A Major Share Ofthe Jewish Future.... [ellipsis In Source] It Was Not Only The Intellect Of A People In Its Prime That Was Excised, But The Treasure Of A People In Its Potential.

Language Makes Culture, And We Make A Rotten Culture When We Abuse Words.

We Were Born To Die; We Were Born To Endure, On The Way To Death, Sorrow-sorrow In Manifold Shapes.

In Real Life Wishing, Divorced From Willing, Is Sterile And Begets Nothing.

Awe Consumes Any Brand That Ignites It.

Above All, A Book Is A Riverbank For The River Of Language. Language Without The Riverbank Is Only Television Talk - A Free Fall, A Loose Splash, A Spill.

Imagine An American Hans Christian Andersen, Conceive Of The Brothers Grimm Living In Missouri, And You Will Approximate Howard Schwartz, A Fable-maker And Fable-gatherer Seduced By The Uncanny And The Unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, He Once Again Reaches Into A Magical Cornucopia Of Folklore And Fantasy And Spreads Before Us, In Enchanting Language, The Marvels And Shocks Of Dybbuks, Ghosts, Demons, Spirits, And Wizards.

I Measure My Life In Sentences Pressed Out, Line By Line, Like The Lustrous Ooze On The Underside Of The Snail, The Snail's Secret Open Seam, Its Wound, Leaking Attar.

Invention Despoils Observations, Insinuation Invalidates Memory. A Stewpot Of Bad Habits, All Of It - So That Imaginative Writers Wind Up, By And Large, A Shifty Crew, Sunk In Distortion, Misrepresentation, Illusion, Imposture, Fakery.

Of Comic Novels That Have Quaffed The Elixir Of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson By Max Beerbohm.

A. Critics: People Who Make Monuments Out Of Books. B. Biographers: People Who Make Books Out Of Monuments. C. Poets: People Who Raze Monuments. D. Publishers: People Who Sell Rubble. E. Readers: People Who Buy It.

A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

The Butterfly Lures Us Not Only Because He Is Beautiful, But Because He Is Transitory. The Caterpillar Is Uglier, But In Him We Can Regard The Better Joy Of Becoming.

It Isn't The Instrument That Influences High-minded Or Low-minded; It's The Quality Of Mind Itself.

It Is Useless Either To Hate Or To Love Truth - But It Should Be Noticed.

To Desire To Be What One Can Be Is Purpose In Life. There Are No Exterior Forces. There Are Only Interior Forces. Who Squanders Talent Praises Death.

Dedication To One's Work In The World Is The Only Possible Sanctifica-tion. Religion In All Its Forms Is Dedication To Someone Else's Work, Not Yours.

There's A Paradox In Rereading. You Read The First Time For Rediscovery: An Encounter With The Confirming Emotions. But You Reread For Discovery: You Go To The Known To Figure Out The Workings Of The Unknown, The Why Of The Familiar How.

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.

... Woman Is Frequently Praised As The More "creative" Sex. She Does Not Need To Make Poems, It Is Argued; She Has No Drive To Make Poems, Because She Is Privileged To Make Babies. A Pregnancy Is As Fulfilling As, Say, Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium.... To Call A Child A Poem May Be A Pretty Metaphor, But It Is A Slur On The Labor Of Art.

Old Saws Have No Teeth.

If We Had To Say What Writing Is, We Would Have To Define It Essentially As An Act Of Courage.

Acts Of Courage

Two Things Remain Irretrievable: Time And A First Impression.

First Impression

Comedy Springs From The Ludicrous; But The Ludicrous Is Stuck In The Muck Of Reality, Resolutely Hostile To What Is Impossible.

The Imagination Has Resources And Intimations We Don't Even Know About.

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.

The Ordinary Is The Divine.

What We Think We Are Surely Going To Do, We Don't Do; And What We Never Intended To Do, We May One Day Notice That We Have Done, And Done, And Done.

To Be Any Sort Of Competent Writer One Must Keep One's Psychological Distance From The Supreme Artists.

History ... Isn't Simply What Has Happened. It's A Judgment On What Has Happened.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.

Literature Is An Instrument Of A Culture, Not A Summary Of It.

What We Remember From Childhood We Remember Forever - Permanent Ghosts, Stamped, Inked, Imprinted, Eternally Seen.

In Books, As In Life, There Are No Second Chances. On Second Thought: Its The Next Work, Still To Be Written, That Offers The Second Chance.

One Must Avoid Ambition In Order To Write. Otherwise Something Else Is The Goal: Some Kind Of Power Beyond The Power Of Language. And The Power Of Language, It Seems To Me, Is The Only Kind Of Power A Writer Is Entitled To.

I Was So Mad At My Agent. I Had Polished And Polished And Polished [the Play], And He Referred To It As A Draft. I Wrote Him A Bitter Letter: How Can You Call This A Draft? I Don't Do Drafts! By Now I've Done 18, And Its Turning, In The Rehearsal Room, Into A 19th.

It Is The Function Of A Liberal University Not To Give Right Answers, But To Ask Right Questions.

The Art Of Fiction Is Freedom Of Will For Your Characters.

Godlessness Invariably Produces Vulgarity. Civilization Is The Product Of Belief.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.

It's True That The Young Who Now Flock To Script Writing, Or Producing And Directing, To Fulfill The Demands Of These New Devices Would, In An Earlier Period, Have Been Submitting To Magazines And Working On Their First Novels. But Even In The Midst Of All These "digital Products," The Wonder Of It Is That There Are Still So Many Young Writers Who Continue To Believe In The Venerable Print Novel As The Corridor To Fame And Fortune.

Time Heals All Things But One: Time.

The Engineering Is Secondary To The Vision.

All Politicians Know That Every 'temporary' Political Initiative Promised As A Short-term Poultice Stays On The Books Forever.

We Often Take For Granted The Very Things That Most Deserve Our Gratitude.

It Is True That Money Attracts; But Much Money Repels.

We Have Had, Alas, And Still Have, The Doubtful Habit Of Reverence. Above All, We Respect Things As They Are.

Wars, Invented And Organized By The Highest Available Consciousnesses (do The Worms Go To War? Do The Fish? Do The Paramecia?), Are The Planet's Chief Source And Cause Of Torment.

Resentment Is A Communicable Disease And Should Be Quarantined.

The Trouble With Happiness Is That It Never Notices Itself.

Advances In Technology Neither Impede Nor Augment Literature.

Why Do Men Carry Guns And Build Prison Camps, When The Nurturing Earth Is Made For Freedom?

Paradise Is Only For Those Who Have Already Been There.

Native American

I Would Distinguish Between A Visitor And A Pilgrim: Both Will Come To A Place And Go Away Again, But A Visitor Arrives, A Pilgrim Is Restored. A Visitor Passes Through A Place; The Place Passes Through The Pilgrim.

We Are So Placid That The Smallest Tremor Of Objection To Anything At All Is Taken As A Full-scale Revolution. Should Any Soul Speak Up In Favor Of The Obvious, It Is Taken As A Symptom Of The Influence Of The Left, The Right, The Pink, The Black, The Dangerous. An Idea For Its Own Sake - Especially An Obvious Idea - Has No Respectability.

Real Apprenticeship Is Ultimately Always To The Self.

What I Felt Then I Feel Now: The Inexorable, Unchanging Interior Hum Of Doubt And Hope.

One Reason Writers Write Is Out Of Revenge.

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 The Other Hand, What Else Would You Do With The Rest Of Your Life? You Gotta Do Something.

Rest Of Your Life

Women Who Write With An Overriding Consciousness That They Write As Women Are Engaged Not In Aspiration Toward Writing, But Chiefly In A Politics Of Sex.

I Read In Order To Write. I Read Out Of Obsession With Writing.

Bohemia And All Its Works Are Vanished Out Of America; Or, More Exactly, Bohemia Has Migrated To The Middle Class, And Is Alive And Well In Condo And Suburb.

If Ideas Are What Feed Serious Literature And Arresting Language, Who Today Is Writing A Novel Of Ideas (which Can Often Mean Comedy)? I Think Of Joshua Cohen. Who Else?

When Something Does Not Insist On Being Noticed, When We Aren't Grabbed By The Collar Or Struck On The Skull By A Presence Or An Event, We Take For Granted The Very Things That Most Deserve Our Gratitude.

Taken For Granted

We Are So Placid That The Smallest Tremor Of Objection Is Taken As A Full-scale Revolution.

The Secular Jew Is A Figment; When A Jew Becomes A Secular Person He Is No Longer A Jew.

I Can't Claim To Be Disenchanted "with The Current State Of Fiction" Because I Read So Little Of It. My Reading Is Mostly Drawn To History.

Death Persecutes Before It Executes.

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, A Writer.

Very Bright Teeth As Big And Orderly As Piano Keys.

The Power Of Language, It Seems To Me, Is The Only Kind Of Power A Writer Is Entitled To.

Language And Power

Nothing Is So Awesomely Unfamiliar As The Familiar That Discloses Itself At The End Of A Journey. Nothing Shakes The Heart So Much As Meeting-far, Far Away-what You Last Met At Home.

Much Of The Academy On The Humanities Side, English Departments In Particular, No Longer Write What Can Pass For Normal English.

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, Dont Confine Yourself To Reading Fiction. Every Writer Is First A Wide Reader.

After A Certain Number Of Years, Our Faces Become Our Biographies.

In Saying What Is Obvious, Never Choose Cunning. Yelling Works Better.

He Who Cries, 'what Do I Care About Universality? I Only Know What Is In Me,' Does Not Know Even That.

Fiction Does Not Invent Out Of A Vacuum, But It Invents; And What It Invents Is, First, The Fabric And Cadence Of Language, And Then A Slant Of Idea That Sails Out Of These As A Fin Lifts From The Sea.

To Imagine The Unimaginable Is The Highest Use Of The Imagination

To Listen Acutely Is To Be Powerless, Even If You Sit On A Throne.

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