Amos Oz quotes

A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops. (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. View quote
Amos Oz
I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right. View quote
Amos Oz
The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination. View quote
Amos Oz
All of my novels are democracies. View quote
Amos Oz
I recommend the art of slow reading. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
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. (Amos Oz)
On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
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 [sic] shouts at us: 'Yids, get out of Palestine.' View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Amos Oz
In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather. View quote
Amos Oz
The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic. (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. View quote
Amos Oz
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. View quote
Amos Oz
I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment. View quote
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. View quote
Amos Oz