Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.

Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.

A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.

All of my novels are democracies.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out.

The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.

Now, Israel is a fulfillment, and as a fulfillment, it is flawed. The fact that it is flawed is not so much a testimony about the failures of Israel. No, it is a testimony about the nature of dreams.

One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.

I could taste the salt on her lips, each kiss like a summer wave breaking on an empty beach.

People often try to distinguish between personal and professional life, but they end failing - Cord 8 : Are we Computers?

Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.

I had long hair when I was a teenager.

Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees

If we are given gold, would we not test it to determine it's value? If we doubted its genuineness - we would test it by fire...and so God with us.

I think that if one's role doesn't correspond to what one says, if one's life doesn't correspond to what one preaches, if one is not true to one's people, someone else will come as a substitute.

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.

What might save us, me and you, is if the Russians love their children too.

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.