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.

One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.

A sincere and warmly-expressed apology can produce the same effects as morphine on a suffering soul.

Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.

Games are like Rorschachs made of human relationships.

The amazing thing about any movie is not whether it's good, but that it got made at all.

Everybody works but the vacant lot

For some reason, people value being scared less than they value laughing.

Unemployed and dependent - is not as parasite.

When the Vikings moved into a place they just kind of killed everybody who was there before them.

My mother died when I was five, and all I did was sit and cry. I cried and cried and cried all day, until the neighbors went away.

If you are afraid of making mistakes, you won't learn anything and you won't make much money.