Amos Oz Quotes - Page 2

I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies. I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another. I write about sad, sober, sometimes heart-breaking compromises.

Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.

Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.

It is wrong to take an 18-year-old boy or girl and arm them with machine guns and make them the almighty king of some little Arab village. No young man, and no old man either, should have so much power over the life and death of so many helpless individuals. It is corrupting. It sometimes provokes desperate, savage and indiscriminate violence among the occupied.

The alternative to fanaticism and to death is not some miraculous realization that someone has been wrong and he has to apologize. No, the answer to fanaticism and to death is curiosity and compromise and concession.

Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves. This is not the case here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right.

The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.

The Six-Day War laid a foundation of deep hatred toward Israel 50 years ago. I said this at a very early moment back then, when people were chanting about liberating ancestral land. I was quick to say that regardless of the future of these territories, liberated they are not, because the term liberation only applies to human beings and not to land, not to real estate.

This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.

We all begin much much much earlier. In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

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

Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.

Let me make it very clear: when I say compromise I do not mean capitulation. When I say compromise I definitely do not mean what Jesus Christ meant when he offered us to turn our other cheek to our enemies. Compromise means, try to meet the other somewhere half-way. And, this can only happen if the other is willing to go half-way in order to meet you. That is the very strict line between compromise and capitulation. I'm a great believer in compromises. I do not believe in capitulation.

I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.

All of my novels are democracies.

Over 70 years after Hitler, a German chancellor, a woman, is the leader of the free world. So don't talk to me about irrevocable.

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.

I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.

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.

Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. 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.

Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves "activists." They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary.

I recommend the art of slow reading.

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.

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.