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
I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The author prefers silence and isolation when writing, avoiding contemporary influences to maintain clarity.
Cynthia Ozick expresses the importance of solitude and a clear mental space while writing. She believes that contemporary fiction introduces too many competing ideas and voices that can clutter her own creativity, hence she turns to the classics for inspiration, as they do not disrupt the silence she seeks for her writing process.
Themes
WritingIsolationSilenceContemporaryInfluenceCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
A writer's workshop discussing the importance of personal voice in writing.
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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I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
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