Amos Oz Quotes

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been repetition. A lot of it is marvelous but the forms haven't changed.

Literature precedes genre.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

There were poets before Homer.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

No one has written the way Isaiah does. The royal style, the majesty of the language. He is called the prince of the prophets. No one has written like that. I've studied ancient literature, Homer, for example, but it's not the same thing.

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.

It's an awful thing to grow old by yourself. My wife hasn't had a birthday in seven years.

Someone told me once that blues is like whiskey. They keep whiskey in the barrel for so many years, and then they talk about how well it's aged. But I don't think that goes for him. I think this young man has just stepped in there sayin', 'I'm gonna prove you all wrong.' I think he's like a watermelon, man. He's ripe.

Work while your strength and years permit you; crooked age will by-and-by come upon you with silent foot.

They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place'd be filling up with terminal cases.

They were very short, the golden years. The golden years are when you can sit back, hopefully, and exchange memories. And that's the worst part about this disease. There's nobody to exchange memories with.

I have had more magazine covers in the last 25 years than I have had in my whole elongated career. [...] Today I am in a territory that business considers unmarketable: age and white hair. Slowly, however, I started to own that territory little by little because I stood up for age.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

When I started in the business, years ago, people would always say, "You better get as much work as you can now because, once you get over 40, it's over." I don't see that with TV. Maybe it's because I am getting older, but the kinds of roles I'm drawn to are more mature roles.

Although wisdom is built on life experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.

O little souls! as pure as white And crystalline as rays of light Direct from heaven, their source divine; Refracted through the mist of years, How red my setting sun appears, How lurid looks this soul of mine!

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

I have no fear of death whatsoever. I suspect that few people do, what they all fear is what might happen in the years or months before death.

I think 26 is the turning point. I’ve got to make up for 10 years of living like a degenerate. I’ve suddenly become conscious of being unhealthy. You’ve spent every bit of free time since [the age of ] 15 in a pub. And suddenly you’re like, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to be this grey ghost sitting there with a pot belly. I’ve got to get it together.

I'm 74 years old and even though I may be a bit of a rascal, 33 girls in two months seems to me too much even for a 30-year-old.