Amos Oz Quotes

I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.

I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.

The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.

I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies.

If people are jumping down people's throats all the time, in the end, they'll just shrivel up like a flower shrivels up that's not watered.

In business people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.

There are definitely racial problems in this country [the USA]. Comedy is a way we can figure out how to solve it, and how to solve it without making people really angry.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Why can't we all just get along?

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

It is through our anger and hatred that we transform people into enemies.

I've never really had a problem with people.

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.

How we treat other people changes them, but even more so, how we treat other people changes us.

(There is) art that states the problems of society and wakes people up to make changes in their lives or in their communities,...art that offers an alternative, that demonstrates human behavior that can become a model for creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness, and...art that in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

I'm a person that can get along with people. I like people who believe passionately in things even if they're not the things I agree with.

There was a lot of apologizing going on, but I realized that was how it was with people you cared about. You forgave each other and moved on.

If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?

As a designer, I'm supposed to be provoking people's reactions, and getting people to see things differently. I think more of us should be doing this. Because yeah, maybe guys are not gonna want to wear my stuff, but they'll think that they can maybe wear something a little bit more than what they've been wearing. That's the only way things move forward.

You can't just throw people at all your problems, dear.

People think I write fantasy, but I don't; some things may be exaggerated or distorted in the same way that painters distort and alter things, but they're realistic figures. They're perfectly recognisable.