Amos Oz Thinking Quotations

I don't think a decent person has to choose between being pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. I think you have to be pro-Peace.

I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.

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.

Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.

I think there are one or two things similar in Elizabethan English and contemporary Hebrew. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.