“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.” IfsWritingFirstsMaySelfReadingBornFictionClassTeachReaderWideUrgesSelf KnowledgeFiction WritersReading Fiction Author:Cynthia Ozick
“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.” PeopleBookLiteraturePoetReaderSellsCriticsPublishersMonumentBiographersRubble Book:Trust Source: Trust
“In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.” LyingReadingReaderPromiseNovelistsCompact Book:A Cynthia Ozick reader Source: A Cynthia Ozick reader
“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.” IfsKindFactsStoriesEasyVoiceCommonMistakeImpossibleMinutesReaderPicksIdeologyLegacyProseShort StoryDisplayRealismTediousPragmatismCommon DenominatorPedestriansLess Is MoreVernacularBlendersTranscription Author:Cynthia Ozick
“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.” CharacterFeelingsSchoolFoundLiteratureImaginationNovelTeachingReaderKingsCapacityMotiveNaiveUnfamiliarLearRaskolnikov Author:Cynthia Ozick
