Ozick's Paris Review Interview

I am ashamed to confess this. It’s ungrateful and wrong. But I am one—how full of shame I feel as I confess this—who expected to achieve—can I dare to get this out of my throat?—something like—impossible to say the words—literary fame by the age of twenty-five. By the age of twenty-seven I saw that holy and anointed youth was over, and even then it was already too late. The decades passed. I’m afraid I think—deeply think—that if it didn’t come at the right time, at the burnished crest of youth, then it doesn’t matter. And I am not even sure what you or I mean by it. I will not now know how to say what it is. So I have put all that away. It is now completely, completely beside the point. One does what one needs to do; that’s all there is. It’s wrong, bad, stupid, senseless to think about anything else. I think only of what it is I want to write about, and then about the problems in the doing of it. I don’t think of anything else at all.
-Cynthia Ozick, Paris Review

I think only of what it is I want to write about, and then about the problems in the doing of it. I don’t think of anything else at all.
-Cynthia Ozick, Paris Review