Over 70 years after Hitler, a German chancellor, a woman, is the leader of the free world. So don't talk to me about irrevocable.

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 can almost picture the disciples faces. "No, not the drink-my-blood speech! We'll never get on the list of fastest-growing movements if you keep asking them to eat you!

To be happy you must have happy thoughts.

One of the processes of your life is to constantly break down that inferiority, to constantly reaffirm that I Am Somebody.

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

Uhm, I'm the one wanting the lessons! I don't want to say too much about it because I'd rather have you see the movie, but he's trying to find his music.

I've flown out of character so many times. In that sense I've been lucky, because I've been given the liberty to do just about anything I've wanted to do in my lifetime.

Problems are guidelines, not stop signs!

I have no interest in being wrong, so if I am, please correct me. I don't want to be wrong. There's nothing in it for you or for me to be wrong.