Quote

I would not waste five years of my life in order to send to the Israeli readers a simple message such as, Let us change a policy or stop the settlements, Or, Let us strive for peace. This is not what it is about.

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
Peace
Strive
Order
Messages
Change
Waste
Settlements
Years
Reader
Settlement
Would
Policy
Israeli
Life
Stop
Readers
Five
Send
Simple
Message

More quotes by Amos Oz

Image
The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.
Amos Oz
Image
My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing. I write in words. I don write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors. I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.
Amos Oz
Image
Israel has obviously not liberated the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. We have occupied them, but we have not liberated them.
Amos Oz
Image
Don't write about that which you don't know.
Amos Oz
Image
I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.
Amos Oz
Image
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
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
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
Everybody comes from somewhere.
Amos Oz
Image
I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.
Amos Oz
Image
Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
Amos Oz
Image
The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.
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
In my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.
Amos Oz
Image
I think there are one or two things similar in Elizabethan English and contemporary Hebrew. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.
Amos Oz
Image
Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.
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
We have to carry through to the next day and hope that we will be okay tomorrow as we are today and in the meantime, enjoy life.
Amos Oz