Quote

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand a short story is a romance, a relationship a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

Amos Oz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Amos Oz
Age: 79 †
Born: 1939
Born: May 4
Died: 2018
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Amos Klausner
Like
Novel
Cunning
Relationship
Poem
Stand
Compromise
Story
Affair
Night
Romance
Stories
Sacrifice
Devise
Writing
Short
Compromises
Make
Marriage
Sacrifices

More quotes by Amos Oz

Image
I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.
Amos Oz
Image
If you change your diet, someone will call you a traitor.
Amos Oz
Image
Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.
Amos Oz
Image
I don't think a decent person has to choose between being pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. I think you have to be pro-Peace.
Amos Oz
Image
In my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life.
Amos Oz
Image
The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.
Amos Oz
Image
All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.
Amos Oz
Image
I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
Image
I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.
Amos Oz
Image
The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.
Amos Oz
Image
Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves.
Amos Oz
Image
All of my novels are democracies.
Amos Oz
Image
The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.
Amos Oz
Image
Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.
Amos Oz
Image
Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: Yids, go back to Palestine, so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: Yids, get out of Palestine.
Amos Oz
Image
I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
Amos Oz
Image
I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.
Amos Oz
Image
In writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.
Amos Oz
Image
Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time.
Amos Oz
Image
Don't write about that which you don't know.
Amos Oz