Amos Oz Quotes

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

Details are the Life of Prose.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

Ever since I was little, I would just make stories up in my mind. It was based on people I saw in the street or someone I would talk to, or I would hear a specific voice.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I like short stories.

It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary.

A book is either autobiography or a novel.