Amos Oz Quotes

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

Literature is 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.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Language is much closer to film than painting is.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

Sometimes I write what I can't paint, and I paint what I can't write. I use a different part of the brain.

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

I don't see poetry as something that has to do with too much emotion anyway. It has to do with language.