Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

As the news agenda goes into warp speed, it becomes ever more difficult for authors writing about current events to keep their books timely and relevant.

Journalists always like an excuse for why are they talking about something now when they didn't talk about something a week ago. They always like to say something is new.

It's very weird about movies: you never know which ones are going to stay alive and which one are going to be meaningless. When you're there, you couldn't possibly predict it. Some things slowly die, and others slowly stay a while.

That's the problem with news interviews, you work your tail off to get prominent figures in the news on the radio, but once they've been on, the event passes, the urgency, the issues you talked about evaporate.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

Those old enough to write their memoirs should not comment on contemporary issues.

The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.

If I make a film about now, the minute it was done, it wouldn't be about now; it'd be about then.

a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.

Good ideas have expiration dates. You need to act before they become dated, irrelevant or otherwise spoiled.

Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

We're working as if it were going out of style-which of course it is.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

Rilke says: Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben - We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.

Wisdom has lost repute because it so often applies to a state of affairs that no longer exists.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.