Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

It's not easy to define poetry.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I like poems that are complex.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

I like poems that are little games.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.