Amos Oz Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

All of my novels are democracies.

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.

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

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.

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.

One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.

I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.

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.

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

The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.

This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.

Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

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.

Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.

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.

Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.

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.

I recommend the art of slow reading.

In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather.

If you change your diet, someone will call you a traitor.

The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.

Different musical instruments provide for different music.

The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.

I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.

Over 70 years after Hitler, a German chancellor, a woman, is the leader of the free world. So don't talk to me about irrevocable.

I'm a great believer in compromises. I do not believe in capitulation.

Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

We have to carry through to the next day and hope that we will be okay tomorrow as we are today and in the meantime, enjoy life.

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

When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.

I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.

I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.

I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.

Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.

The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. All of them take place in Israel - in Jerusalem, in the desert, in the kibbutz, in small towns, in villages.

My dream is much more modest than the dreams of the founding fathers. My dream is for Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself. This will be sufficient for me.

Almost every modern literary form existed in Hebrew two thousand years ago. And, yes, it existed even during the middle ages.

My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace.

The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.

I write in words. I don't write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.

"The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.