Amos Oz Quotes

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.

But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.