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I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as task or role when they are attached to literature.
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
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Tasks
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Roles
Literature
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More quotes by Amos Oz
I have been saying again and again that the case of Israel and Palestine, the case of Israel and the Arab world, and indeed the case of Israel and Europe, is not black and white. It's not a western movie.
Amos Oz
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
I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.
Amos Oz
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
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.
Amos Oz
Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.
Amos Oz
Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.
Amos Oz
I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it.
Amos Oz
A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.
Amos Oz
My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace. I want Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and in peace with itself.
Amos Oz
This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.
Amos Oz
In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.
Amos Oz
The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out.
Amos Oz
I never regard my characters, my protagonists, as personifications. It's not that I sit by my desk and I pick up a character who will be the spokesperson of the Israeli Left, another one will be the spokesperson of the Right, another one will be the spokesperson of Middle Eastern Jews, European Jews, religions Jews and so on.
Amos Oz
Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.
Amos Oz
Recently with IS and Islamist fanaticism, it has become easy for the Israeli government to simply push the Palestinian struggle for self-determination into the same ranks as these fundamentalist movements.
Amos Oz
When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. And, sometimes in very, very different places, because we all come from somewhere, especially here in Israel.
Amos Oz
Everybody comes from somewhere.
Amos Oz
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
Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.
Amos Oz
