I write in words. I don't write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.

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 do maintain that if your hair is wrong, your entire life is wrong.

Because I am exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I should be doing. That is peace." Pax, Pennypacker.

A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately.

Only through training will a person learn his own weaknesses... He who is aware of his weaknesses will remain master of himself in any situation.

I must admit that it seems like my mind really reconstructs some things, and in a very - I just know that it seems like some things are not as I remembered them when I do some investigation.

A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?

The only way to real mature love is to get past the tropes of what we consider 'romance.'

My grandfather was a faith healer and medium and he always encouraged faith in the unseen. I believe in fortune tellers.

The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.

Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.