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
Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the profound nature of storytelling, highlighting the contrasts between the active lives of novelists and the contemplative nature of essayists.
Cynthia Ozick’s quote emphasizes the different approaches to exploration of human experiences in literature. Novelists engage actively with themes of love and death by placing their characters in transformative experiences, suggesting a dynamic interplay between life events. In contrast, essayists seek to introspectively analyze these themes, pondering their implications in a quieter, more reflective manner. Together, these perspectives create a richer understanding of the human condition.
Themes
LiteratureStorytellingNovelsEssaysLoveDeath
In practice
Example use cases
A writer may use this quote in a lecture about the different styles of literary expression.
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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