In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

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.

When you’re late in a fairy tale, people wind up dead. And not true-love’s-kiss, glass-coffin-nap-time dead. Really dead, the kind of dead you don’t recover from.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

Give thy love freely, do not count the cost: So beautiful a thing was never lost.

We are a nation of communities... a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.

Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.

We hate to have some people give us advice because we know how badly they need it themselves.

The newest victims of the nation's foreclosure crisis are pets, which is extremely distressing to me.

Like an animal, cancer sleeps, prowls, hibernates, turns surly or placid.

Churches are having a limited impact on society because they fail to understand that the goal of the church is not the church itself but the kingdom.