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In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather.

Amos Oz

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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
Way
Sharon
Feather
Feathers
Birds
Bird
Regard
Ways
Many
Arafat

More quotes by Amos Oz

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I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.
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I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.
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Everybody comes from somewhere.
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I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.
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But for 30 years, Orthodox leaders have tipped the balance between hawks and doves, and have been in a position to determine who forms a coalition and who runs the country.
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I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.
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You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
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Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.
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If we don't stop somewhere, if we don't accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don't learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice - if we don't learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state.
Amos Oz
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The alternative to fanaticism and to death is not some miraculous realization that someone has been wrong and he has to apologize. No, the answer to fanaticism and to death is curiosity and compromise and concession.
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If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.
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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
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When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, You should not do that, you should do this. They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.
Amos Oz
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I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as task or role when they are attached to literature. I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task. You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
Amos Oz
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Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English.
Amos Oz
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Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.
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I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque.
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Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves activists. They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary.
Amos Oz
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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
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All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.
Amos Oz