The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

Like herbs in a pestle, life steadily ground out the essence of those who did not have access to comforts.

Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.

There's a whole generation coming up behind us that was engaged, inspired, worked for change during the course of my presidency, saw what was possible.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The little bee returns with evening's gloom, To join her comrades in the braided hive, Where, housed beside their might honey-comb, They dream their polity shall long survive.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.

Who and where you look is an indicator of who and what you know.

Life is too short no matter what party you are with.