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Literature is for the sake of humanity.

- Cynthia Ozick
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Author:
Cynthia Ozick
Tags:
Humanity
Literature
Sake
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I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.

I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha!

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.

My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.

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Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.