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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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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
Writing
Gutsy
Advice
Writer
Write
Young
Wells
Well
More quotes by Amos Oz
Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?
Amos Oz
But for 30 years, Orthodox leaders have tipped the balance between hawks and doves, and have been in a position to determine who forms a coalition and who runs the country.
Amos Oz
You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
Amos Oz
I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.
Amos Oz
Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.
Amos Oz
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
Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.
Amos Oz
My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace.
Amos Oz
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
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
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
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
I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.
Amos Oz
I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies. I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another. I write about sad, sober, sometimes heart-breaking compromises.
Amos Oz
Literature is about telling stories.
Amos Oz
In my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life.
Amos Oz
Don't write about that which you don't know.
Amos Oz
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
Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time.
Amos Oz
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
