The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

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.

give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I'm about to do something that's genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I'll be like, 'Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.'

From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.

I can be a much better player. I've got a long ways to go.

The truly thankful person is a truly peaceful person.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.