Amos Oz Quotations

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.

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.

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

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.

And in this respect, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim.

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

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 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.

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.

It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort.

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

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

For more than 30 years, ... the settlers' dream has overwhelmed the dream of secular Israelis. Day in and day out, the vision of Greater Israel and the reign of the Messiah crushed the hope of being a free people and building a just society.

Two years ago, a sudden change occurred. Sharon's rhetoric changed overnight.

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.

I recommend the art of slow reading.

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.

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.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.

The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like.

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

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

The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.

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

When I say compromise I do not mean capitulation. When I say compromise I definitely do not mean what Jesus Christ meant when he offered us to turn our other cheek to our enemies. Compromise means, try to meet the other somewhere half-way. And, this can only happen if the other is willing to go half-way in order to meet you. That is the very strict line between compromise and capitulation.

Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.

Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?

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

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.

Never cut loose from your longings.

Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: Yids, go back to Palestine, so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: Yids, get out of Palestine.

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

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

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

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

My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing.

The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

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.

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.

I want Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and in peace with itself.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I write in words. I don write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.

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.

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

Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves.

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.

I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.

There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.

Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.

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

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

Literature is about telling stories.

I would not waste five years of my life in order to send to the Israeli readers a simple message such as, "Let us change a policy or stop the settlements," Or, "Let us strive for peace." This is not what it is about.

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.

You know, gynecology has a role; sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.

I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.

Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.

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 - very small, about the size of New Jersey. And both of them are right. Both of them have no other homeland as peoples. As individuals, maybe, but not as a people.

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.

I never regard my characters, my protagonists, as personifications. It's not that I sit by my desk and I pick up a character who will be the spokesperson of the Israeli Left, another one will be the spokesperson of the Right, another one will be the spokesperson of Middle Eastern Jews, European Jews, religions Jews and so on.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right. And, therefore it's not black and white. Sometimes, recently it is indeed a clash between wrong and wrong. It is not as simple as fascism was.

In writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.

When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.

I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.

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.

The reconciliation is not based on the fact that one of the characters opens his eyes and says, "O brother! O sister! How terrible I was! How right and wonderful you were! Please forgive me! Let's hug and love each other from now until the rest of eternity!" This is not the kind of reconciliation I write about; I write about sad, sober, sometimes heart-breaking compromises.

I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.

There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.

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

Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.

Israel is imperfect, of course it is - a far cry from the monumental dreams of the founding fathers. One of the reasons is that their dreams were unrealistic. They were bigger than life. These were messianic dreams, dreams about total redemption for the Jews, for the world. Such dreams do not come true, not in their entirety.

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.

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.

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.

Different musical instruments provide for different music.

Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time.

Things can be translated, but they become different.

Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.

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.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.

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.

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

Every language has influences and is an influence.

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.