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My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing.

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
Instruments
Musical
Fact
Facts
Important
Writing
Hebrew
Instrument

More quotes by Amos Oz

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Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.
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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Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
Amos Oz
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There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.
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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We supporters of the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine are now under a fierce attack from the far right and from the far left in Israel and in Europe. If I were a paranoid, I would say that maybe the far left and the far right are coordinating a conspiracy.
Amos Oz
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Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: Yids, go back to Palestine, so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: Yids, get out of Palestine.
Amos Oz
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Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.
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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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
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Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves.
Amos Oz
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I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.
Amos Oz
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I don't believe in binational states. There are wonderful examples of this, prosperous multinational states: Switzerland, Switzerland and Switzerland. Everywhere else - be it Cyprus, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, it ended in a terrible bloodbath.
Amos Oz
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Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.
Amos Oz
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I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
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It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.
Amos Oz
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I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.
Amos Oz
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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
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I think there are one or two things similar in Elizabethan English and contemporary Hebrew. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.
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