Amos Oz Quotations | Page 2

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.

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.

Everybody comes from somewhere.

When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. And, sometimes in very, very different places, because we all come from somewhere, especially here in Israel.

A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.

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.

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.

Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.

All of my novels are democracies.

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

Don't write about that which you don't know.

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.

That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

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.

I call'd the devil, and he came / And with wonder his form did I closely scan / He is not ugly, and is not lame / But really a handsome and charming man / A man in the prime of life is the devil / Obliging, a man of the world, and civil / A diplomatist too, well skill'd in debate / He talks quite glibly of church and state.