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
writing advice
That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.
writing
Don't write about that which you don't know.
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.
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.
brother writing character
The reconciliation is not based on the fact that one of the characters opens his eyes and says, "O brother! O sister! How terrible I was! How right and wonderful you were! Please forgive me! Let's hug and love each other from now until the rest of eternity!" This is not the kind of reconciliation I write about; I write about sad, sober, sometimes heart-breaking compromises.
writing miracle mutual
I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.
writing people enemy
I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies.
writing novel listen-to-me
When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.
writing giving perspective
In writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.
writing appearance novel
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.
writing
I write in words. I don write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.
writing hebrew
I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.
dream country writing
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.
writing musical important
My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing.