Amos Oz Quotes

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.

That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.

I think everybody is allowed, especially when they're telling a story, as long as it's not based on somebody's real life, you're allowed a certain liberty.

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

Life holds many, many, many mysteries, abstract things we all think about. In a film when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people. I like a film, a story that holds concrete things but also abstractions. So when ideas come along that have those things, I'm falling in love and going to work.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

How you imagine the world determines how you live in it.

It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

When I write a story, I just wanna tell you what's in my head. It can come from real life and then turn into fantasy, stuff just rhyming. And write about what you know. I just like to tell stories that have not been told or [told] from my perspective.

I think that my sensibilities are becoming slightly less delicate and I'm venturing out in a storytelling world.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.