Amos Oz Quotes

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Amos Oz

Profession : Writer

Birth : May 4, 1939

Happiness as a human condition is something I never believed in. I think there are moments of happiness. I don't think there is a lasting happiness. I think this is unthinkable.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

Nobody ever predicted, a week before President Sadat came to Jerusalem in 1977, that his arrival would be the beginning of a peace process that would end up in an - unhappy - Israeli-Egyptian peace. We have seen peace with Egypt. We have seen peace with Jordan. We have seen the handshake between Rabin and Arafat - things are possible.

Amos Oz

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.

Amos Oz

I love Israel, but I don't like it very much.

Amos Oz

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.

Amos Oz

I have almost never written about my experience as a soldier on the battlefield, because I tried, and I found that it is beyond my capacity to describe the battlefield. The battlefield consists mostly of smells, and it is very difficult to describe smells in words - very difficult indeed.

Amos Oz

Jesus was born a Jew, and he died a Jew. It never occurred to him to establish a new religion. He never crossed himself: he had no reason to. He never set one foot in a church. He went to synagogue.

Amos Oz

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.

Amos Oz

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

I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls - I had no chance in either - I found my comfort in Jesus.

Amos Oz

All of my novels are democracies.

Amos Oz

I listen to my political rivals sometimes with fear and trembling, sometimes with awe, sometimes with near panic, but always with a curiosity of nuances, curiosity for the language, curiosity for the story behind the 'impossible' position.

Amos Oz

Very often, fanaticism begins at home. It begins inside the family. It begins with the urge to change our kin, to change our beloved ones for their own good because we think we know better than them what is good and what is bad for them, what is right and what is wrong in their thinking.

Amos Oz

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.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul; otherwise, you would die of terror - you would die of fear. You switch off your soul, and you act like an animal or a machine.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

I am not a pacifist in terms of turning the other cheek.

Amos Oz

My parents - they tried to become American, they tried to become British, they tried to become Scandinavian - nobody wanted them, anywhere.

Amos Oz