Amos Oz

When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul; otherwise, you would die of terror - you would die of fear. You switch off your soul, and you act like an animal or a machine.

Trump is many things. He is pampered. He is an immature man. He is a teenager craving unconditional, endless love from everybody.

I love Israel, but I don't like it very much.

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

I have almost never written about my experience as a soldier on the battlefield, because I tried, and I found that it is beyond my capacity to describe the battlefield. The battlefield consists mostly of smells, and it is very difficult to describe smells in words - very difficult indeed.

I've been called a traitor a few times in my life by some of my countrymen.

Every country in the world should follow the example of President Trump and move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. But simultaneously, there should be an embassy of all countries in the world in East Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Palestine.

On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.

Nobody ever predicted, a week before President Sadat came to Jerusalem in 1977, that his arrival would be the beginning of a peace process that would end up in an - unhappy - Israeli-Egyptian peace. We have seen peace with Egypt. We have seen peace with Jordan. We have seen the handshake between Rabin and Arafat - things are possible.

There is a difference between myself and some of the peace people in Europe: whereas they think that the ultimate evil in the world is war, I think the ultimate evil in the world is aggression, and aggression sometimes must be repelled by force.

Happiness as a human condition is something I never believed in. I think there are moments of happiness. I don't think there is a lasting happiness. I think this is unthinkable.