Cynthia Ozick Quotes About Language
-
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.
→ -
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?
→ -
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.
→ -
Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
→
Related Authors
-
Saul Bellow Writer -
Karan Mahajan Novelist -
Philip Roth Novelist -
Lionel Trilling Literary critic -
Don DeLillo Writer -
Paolo Sorrentino Film director -
Grace Paley Writer -
Ada Louise Huxtable Architectural Critic -
Wolf Kahn Painter -
Joyce Carol Oates Author -
John Updike Novelist -
Raymond Carver Writer -
Henry Roth Novelist -
William H. Gass Novelist -
Louis Auchincloss Lawyer -
Bernard Malamud Author -
Isaac Bashevis Singer Author -
Norman Mailer Novelist -
Alice Munro Author -
Bruno Schulz Writer