Amos Oz Quotes

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

It's a strange thing, but you get this click in your brain; the wonderful feeling that the entirety of a character is suddenly available and accessible to you.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

That man sees indeed the truth who sees that vision and creation are one.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Literature is about telling stories. Now, the gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded. It may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual.

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in Heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot, As if a chart were given.

In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God lets him wrestle with it as best he may.

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader's head.

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.