Cynthia Ozick Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Language And Power, Kind

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Ambition, Order

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Book, Fall, Reading

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “A Cynthia Ozick Reader”, p.305, Indiana University Press

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Christian, Brother, Caves

• Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Abuse, Culture, Rotten

• 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.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Sea, Ideas, Vacuums

  Cynthia Ozick (2006). “The Din in the Head”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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?

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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