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I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.

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
Become
Apart
Change
Follow
Intimately
Ideas
Close
Versa
Sometimes
Move
Novelist
Way
Position
Positions
People
Moving
Novelists
Business
Vice
Another
Vices

More quotes by Amos Oz

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The State of the Jews was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.
Amos Oz
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My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace. I want Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and in peace with itself.
Amos Oz
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We lived through a relatively golden age between the end of World War II and Sept. 11, 2001.
Amos Oz
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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
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The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.
Amos Oz
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I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as task or role when they are attached to literature. I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task. You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
Amos Oz
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Every language has influences and is an influence.
Amos Oz
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Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. 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
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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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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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I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as task or role when they are attached to literature.
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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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
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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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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
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The morning I woke up and it was announced that Trump was the elected president of the United States, I wrote to Angela Merkel. I said that she - at least for me - is now the leader of the free world.
Amos Oz
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In my essays and articles I have been saying again and again that the case of Israel and Palestine, the case of Israel and the Arab world, and indeed the case of Israel and Europe, is not black and white. It's not a western movie.
Amos Oz
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Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.
Amos Oz
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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
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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