“Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt...” — Cynthia Ozick Quote

Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.

The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.

If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

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.

Lunch, for me, usually consists of lots of salad and sometimes smoked or grilled salmon, tofu, or feta cheese. I make sure to add a lot of greens to my salad. I accompany this with some dal.

About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.

Women are a key part of the sound of the groups that accompany male singers like Kirk Franklin, Israel Houghton, and myself.

We are dealing with treachery and threats, which accompanied the establishment of Israel.