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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

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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
Instrument
Sounds
Musical
Shapes
Fact
Words
Write
Flavors
Important
Hebrew

More quotes by Amos Oz

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I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.
Amos Oz
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I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.
Amos Oz
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Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.
Amos Oz
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Different musical instruments provide for different music.
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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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.
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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Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand a short story is a romance, a relationship a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
Amos Oz
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In my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life.
Amos Oz
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She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.
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 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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Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.
Amos Oz
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We all begin much much much earlier. 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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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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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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I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.
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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I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies.
Amos Oz
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The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.
Amos Oz