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Literature is about telling stories.

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
Telling
Literature
Stories

More quotes by 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.
Amos Oz
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Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.
Amos Oz
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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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There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.
Amos Oz
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Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.
Amos Oz
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I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
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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
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When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.
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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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
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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.
Amos Oz
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No human being really begins on the day which appears in the passport as their date of birth. We all begin much much much earlier.
Amos Oz
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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
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My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace.
Amos Oz
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I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.
Amos Oz
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Every language has influences and is an influence.
Amos Oz
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Almost every modern literary form existed in Hebrew two thousand years ago. And, yes, it existed even during the middle ages.
Amos Oz
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Each time I have the urge in me to make a statement or send a message or to issue a manifesto, I don't bother to write a novel. I write an article and publish it in a popular newspaper, or I make a television appearance.
Amos Oz
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I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.
Amos Oz
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A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.
Amos Oz