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
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.
democracy novel
All of my novels are democracies.
dream
Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.
writing sacrifice night
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.
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.
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.
parent legacy culture
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.
country reality novel
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.
different sometimes novel
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.
Everybody comes from somewhere.
literature language
Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.
being-real birth
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.
writing novel
I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it.
language influence
Every language has influences and is an influence.