I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.

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.

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

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.

I never gave him a chance to decide if I was worth loving. I'd taken that choice away from him - because I feared what it would be.

It’s a lot cleaner when Command kills you on purpose . . . than when they do it by accident.

My impression, is that prayer is one of the most basic forms of magic. That it's harnessing the powers of your mind

Life is filled with difficult decisions, he thought. And winners are those who make them.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted

We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

We save the world by being alive ourselves.

The only real payoff for leadership is eternal.

You are who you are by virtue of the company you keep.