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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

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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
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

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Universally, not only in Israel, people want to feel good about themselves. We all want to feel good to some extent.
Amos Oz
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The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like.
Amos Oz
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All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.
Amos Oz
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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
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On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
Amos Oz
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Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
Amos Oz
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My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace.
Amos Oz
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I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.
Amos Oz
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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
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The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. All of them take place in Israel - in Jerusalem, in the desert, in the kibbutz, in small towns, in villages.
Amos Oz
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Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
Amos Oz
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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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The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.
Amos Oz
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I would love to leave my children and grandchildren a nicer world than the one I am going to leave them. But bearing in mind that I was born in the world of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, the legacy I leave them might not be as terrible as the legacy my parents and grandparents left to me.
Amos Oz
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That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.
Amos Oz
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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
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The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.
Amos Oz
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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
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A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.
Amos Oz
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Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.
Amos Oz