Amos Oz
Amos Oz
Amos Ozis an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist and intellectual. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. He is regarded as Israel's most famous living author...
NationalityIsraeli
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth4 May 1939
CountryIsrael
literature psychological
Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.
literature
I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.
literature painting music-is
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.
novel exception
Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
sleep guy feelings
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.
trying literature translations
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.
claim clash convincing land less painful
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.
fanaticism far headlines militancy novel people precisely
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.
reading imagine pleasure
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.
growing-up book ambition
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.
democracy novel
All of my novels are democracies.
live-life exclamation-points living-my-life
Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
fate unhappy sides
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.
family world mysterious
I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.