List of Amos Oz Quotes

If You Change Your Diet, Someone Will Call You A Traitor.

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.

On My Parents Scale Of Values, The More Western Something Was, The More Cultured It Was Considered.

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.

Literature Is Not Made Of Ideas And It's Not Made Of Concepts, Of Psychological Analysis. It's Made Of Words.

Literature Exists Inside The Language. It's Made Of Words.

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.

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.

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.

Black Box Is Not A Statement About Injustice Committed Against Sephardi Oriental Jews Or About The Extremism Of Religious Jews Or The Lack Of Imagination Of The Old Israeli Elites. It's A Human Story, In My View, First And Foremost About A Mystical Communion Between Enemies. This Is The Inner Story Of The Novel. This Is My Business As A Novelist. It Is Not About Positions And Ideas.

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.

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.