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 OzickRead
Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cynthia Ozick expresses her admiration for several renowned American authors and highlights the unique voice of Gordon Lish.
In this quote, Cynthia Ozick conveys her respect for prominent American literary figures such as Alice Munro, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, whom she regards as masters of contemporary literature. Additionally, she acknowledges Gordon Lish as a distinctive and emotionally profound voice in the literary world, demonstrating her appreciation for both established and emerging writers.
Themes
LiteratureAdmirationAuthorsOriginalityVoice
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the influence of writers on modern literature, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of both celebrated and innovative voices in storytelling.
More from Cynthia Ozick
All quotes →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.
Cynthia OzickRead
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 OzickRead
An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.
Cynthia OzickRead
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 OzickRead
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, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
Cynthia OzickRead
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