After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies.

— Cynthia Ozick

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.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctification. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work not yours.

— Cynthia Ozick

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.

— Cynthia Ozick

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

— Cynthia Ozick

I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination.

— Cynthia Ozick

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

— Cynthia Ozick

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.

— Cynthia Ozick

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.

— Cynthia Ozick