I recommend the art of slow reading.

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.

Someday my prince will come, ” she lamented softly, “too fast.

I work in a restaurant in an airport in Taiwan. I am eighteen years old and I don’t like my job because everyone gets on planes and leaves. And I want to leave too.

What do you hang on the walls of your mind?

A simple social engineering hack might involve leaving a thumb drive on the pavement close to the driver's door of a car.

The Word God wastes nothing and He heals two broken hearts with one story - the reader and the writer.

I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish."

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?

I never like to refer back to anything I've done when I'm working on a character, even if that character has the same occupation.

The world can be a hard place sometimes... You have to have heart. You have to be strong. Parents want their children to grow up to be strong. Not just any strong, mind you, but loving strong.

We learn to lie by believing words rather than experience.