Quote

You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.

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
Role
Roles
Literature
Gynecology
Sending
Messages
Gift
Sex

More quotes by Amos Oz

Image
Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.
Amos Oz
Image
Universally, not only in Israel, people want to feel good about themselves. We all want to feel good to some extent.
Amos Oz
Image
There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.
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
Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.
Amos Oz
Image
If people are pro-Israel, they are pro-Israel one-hundred-and-twenty percent. If they are anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian, they tend to be pro-Palestinian one-hundred-and-twenty percent.
Amos Oz
Image
Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.
Amos Oz
Image
I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.
Amos Oz
Image
I write in words. I don't write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.
Amos Oz
Image
I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
Amos Oz
Image
Actually, who hasn't been through the ghastly experience of sitting in front of a blank page, with its toothless mouth grinning at you: Go ahead, let's see you lay a finger on me? A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant.
Amos Oz
Image
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.
Amos Oz
Image
All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.
Amos Oz
Image
The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.
Amos Oz
Image
Different musical instruments provide for different music.
Amos Oz
Image
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.
Amos Oz
Image
Every language has influences and is an influence.
Amos Oz
Image
My dream is much more modest than the dreams of the founding fathers. My dream is for Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself. This will be sufficient for me.
Amos Oz