Quote

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

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
Others
Manifest
May
Statements
Look
Reader
Looks
Beyond
Different
Goes
Way
Principles
Reexamine
Make
Literature
Manifesting
Making
Conventions

More quotes by Amos Oz

Image
My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
Democracy in many parts of the world is undergoing a very deep crisis. Politics is becoming a branch of the entertainment industry. People vote not for the best leader, but for the funniest candidate.
Amos Oz
Image
Things can be translated, but they become different.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
I write in words. I don't write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.
Amos Oz
Image
I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.
Amos Oz
Image
The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.
Amos Oz
Image
Over 70 years after Hitler, a German chancellor, a woman, is the leader of the free world. So don't talk to me about irrevocable.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Everybody comes from somewhere.
Amos Oz
Image
I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
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
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
Image
I don't think a decent person has to choose between being pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. I think you have to be pro-Peace.
Amos Oz