Cynthia Ozick

Forms and genres, like all breathing things, have their natural life spans. They are born into a set of societal conditions and become moribund when those conditions attenuate. But if the novel were to wither—if, say, it metamorphosed altogether into a species of journalism or movies, as many popular novels already have—then the last trustworthy vessel of the inner life (aside from our heads) would crumble away.

Good-citizen writers, by contrast, year after year decline no summons, refuse no banquet, turn away from no tedium, willingly enter into every anecdote and brook the assault of any amplified band. They will put down their pens for a noodle pudding.

Their work will not be taken for work.

It may be that the little magazines no longer define themselves as uniformly as they once did because they cannot.

For a long time it hardly recognized itself for what it was, and was often confused with the magazine article—that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap thing.

She thought herself capable of doing anything, and did everything she imagined. But nothing was perfect. There was always some clear flaw, never visible head-on. You had to look underneath, where the seams were. The corn thrived, though not in rows. The stalks elbowed one another like gossips in a dense little village.

She was an optimist who ignored trifles; for her, God was not in the details but in the intent

She was all profusion, abundance, fabrication

The sentence I am writing is my cabin and my shell, compact, self-sufficient.

Rupture doesn’t attract me: I would rather inherit coherence than smash and start over again with enigma.