Daily Inspiration Quote by Cynthia Ozick

Ozick’s line is a small grenade lobbed at the literary temptation to smirk. When the thing you need to say is obvious, she argues, don’t lace it with “cunning” - don’t hide behind the knowing aside, the winking sophistication, the carefully engineered ambiguity that signals you’re too smart to be earnest. Just yell.

That blunt ending is the point: “Yelling works better” isn’t a celebration of noise so much as a defense of moral volume. Ozick has spent a career circling questions of Jewish history, memory, and the intellectual’s responsibility; in that terrain, cleverness can start to look like evasion. Cunning is a strategy for people who want to keep their hands clean: you imply, you insinuate, you let the reader do the dirty work of commitment. Yelling, by contrast, is a choice to risk embarrassment, to be accused of melodrama, to be unhip. It’s also a recognition that “the obvious” often remains politically and culturally unsaid because institutions reward subtlety and punish plain speech.

There’s irony here, too: Ozick is herself an exacting stylist. So the admonition isn’t anti-art. It’s anti-vanity. She’s warning writers (and intellectuals generally) that when the stakes are clear, the most “artful” move may be to stop performing cleverness and simply apply pressure. The subtext: if you’re still being cute when the house is on fire, you’re not an artist - you’re décor.