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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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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
Every
Israeli
Things
Shakespeare
Think
Similar
Thinking
Contemporary
English
Elizabethan
Writers
Hebrew
Two
Similarity
Certain
William

More quotes by Amos Oz

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Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.
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My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing.
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I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.
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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.
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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.
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In my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life.
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The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.
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Don't write about that which you don't know.
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I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
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That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.
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Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
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Different musical instruments provide for different music.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.
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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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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.
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I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.
Amos Oz
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Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.
Amos Oz