Amos Oz Quotes

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

My inspiration came especially in the 1950s through the Vienna Group founded by writer H.C. Artmann. It showed me that if you want to say something, you have to let the language itself say it, because language is usually more meaningful than the mere content that one wishes to convey.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

You have to be a really talented writer if you're trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don't have the focus to do that, really.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

A poet must sing for his own people.

For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.

I'm not an intellectual, I'm just a writer.

If you sat down and you wrote a script, you may write something that's way beyond what you've ever seen me do, but if you thought of me to do it, I would be flattered to be asked to do something other than be wise.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world