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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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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
Example
Examples
Wonderful
Prosperous
Else
Soviet
Bloodbath
States
Ended
Cyprus
Believe
Union
Multinational
Unions
Multinationals
Everywhere
Yugoslavia
Terrible
Switzerland

More quotes by Amos Oz

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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
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Each time I have the urge in me to make a statement or send a message or to issue a manifesto, I don't bother to write a novel. I write an article and publish it in a popular newspaper, or I make a television appearance.
Amos Oz
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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
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In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.
Amos Oz
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You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
Amos Oz
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A long war is degenerating - it ruins the mind and the soul and psyche of individuals and nations.
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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Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
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 prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.
Amos Oz
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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
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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
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Israel of the coastal plain, where eight out of ten Israeli Jews live far removed from the occupied territories, from the fiery Jerusalem, from the religious and nationalistic conflicts, is unknown to the outside world, almost unknown to itself.
Amos Oz
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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
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I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it.
Amos Oz
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If you change your diet, someone will call you a traitor.
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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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
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Don't write about that which you don't know.
Amos Oz
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All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.
Amos Oz