Amos Oz Quotes

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Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.

Amos Oz

Live Life, Exclamation Points, Living My Life

45 Copy quote
Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.

Amos Oz

War, Responsibility, Self

31 Copy quote
The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.

Amos Oz

Integrity, Opposites, Compromise

"'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

24 Copy quote
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

Dream, Perfect, Way

28 Copy quote
Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.

Amos Oz

Reading, Imagine, Pleasure

56 Copy quote
The Palestinians are not going anywhere - -they have nowhere to go. The Israeli Jews also aren't going anywhere - they have nowhere to go. But we cannot become one happy family, because we are not. So, we have to divide the house into two smaller apartments and learn how to say, "good morning" in the hall every day. Eventually, perhaps we will pop in on each other for a cup of coffee. But we need this semi-detached house, a two-family unit.

Amos Oz

Morning, Coffee, Two

Source: www.spiegel.de

17 Copy quote
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

Amos Oz

Growing Up, Book, Ambition

Amos Oz (2005). “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

48 Copy quote
If people are pro-Israel, they are pro-Israel one-hundred-and-twenty percent. If they are anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian, they tend to be pro-Palestinian one-hundred-and-twenty percent. 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

Thinking, People, Decent

Source: logger.believermag.com

9 Copy quote
A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.

Amos Oz

Heart, People, Mind

29 Copy quote
Democracy in many parts of the world is undergoing a very deep crisis. Politics is becoming a branch of the entertainment industry. People vote not for the best leader, but for the funniest candidate.

Amos Oz

People, Leader, Democracy

Source: www.spiegel.de

21 Copy quote
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

Writing, Sacrifice, Night

38 Copy quote
Literature is about telling stories. Now, the gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded. It may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

Amos Oz

Reading, Eye, Lucky

Source: logger.believermag.com

10 Copy quote
Sometimes, recently Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed a clash between wrong and wrong. It is not as simple as fascism was. Every decent man had to be against fascism, period. It is not as simple as apartheid or colonialism or racism or misogyny. It is not simple because the Palestinians have no other land. They are absolutely right about this. The Israeli Jews also have no other land and they are absolutely right about this. It is a tragedy of two peoples claiming the same very small country, about the size of New Jersey.

Amos Oz

Country, Simple, Men

Source: logger.believermag.com

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In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

Amos Oz

Vocabulary, Compromise

17 Copy quote
Now, Israel is a fulfillment, and as a fulfillment, it is flawed. The fact that it is flawed is not so much a testimony about the failures of Israel. No, it is a testimony about the nature of dreams.

Amos Oz

Dream, Israel, Facts

"'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

20 Copy quote
I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.

Amos Oz

Men, Old Man, Irrevocable

Source: www.spiegel.de

6 Copy quote
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

Book, Stealing, Academic

Amos Oz (2005). “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, p.129, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

17 Copy quote
My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace. I want Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and in peace with itself.

Amos Oz

Dream, Neighbor

Source: logger.believermag.com

12 Copy quote
Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.

Amos Oz

Children, Past, Two

Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth on PBS, 2002.

16 Copy quote
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

Wall, Doors, Mouths

Amos Oz (1999). “The Story Begins: Essays on Literature”, Harcourt

25 Copy quote
We got a wonderful present from Stalin and Hitler that they never meant to give us. We were immune for 60 years or so to aggression, racism and militarism. They made us partly immune to these things. Now it appears this Stalin-Hitler present has reached its expiration date. We were spoiled by this. So maybe we are just emerging out of a relatively golden age.

Amos Oz

Years, Racism, Giving

Source: www.spiegel.de

15 Copy quote
Never cut loose from your longings.

Amos Oz

Cutting, Desire, Longing

4 Copy quote
The Jews have a powerful ally, America, but they do not really have a bigger family in the same way that there is a European family or an Arab-Muslim family. People who fail to understand this ambivalence will never understand this country. They will not be able to understand how Netanyahu could win the last election by saying the Iranians are coming, Islamic State (IS) is coming, the Arabs are coming, and the whole world hates us anyway.

Amos Oz

Country, Powerful, Hate

Source: www.spiegel.de

4 Copy quote
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

Writing, People, Miracle

Source: logger.believermag.com

4 Copy quote
Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.

Amos Oz

Dream, Imperfect, Fulfilled

"'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

6 Copy quote

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Latest quotes from interviews

"Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago. "The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel. A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of another novel written by the same author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no state. There was no nation. All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams."

- Amos Oz,

logger.believermag.com, added Aug 10, 2017

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Amos Oz

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Born: May 4, 1939
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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