Amos Oz Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

  Amos Oz

  Growing Up, Book, Ambition

  Amos Oz (2005). “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.

  Amos Oz

  Book, Stealing, Academic

  Amos Oz (2005). “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, p.129, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

  Amos Oz

  Book, Musical, Different

  "'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

• Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

  Amos Oz

  Book, Musical, Literature

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• Of course my books are translated into many languages. I have here, in my home, translations on my shelf of my books into forty-five different languages. Almost none of them I can read. I can read only the English editions. But, I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque. So, different musical instruments provide for different music.

  Amos Oz

  Book, Home, Musical

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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