The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so.
Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries.
We're living with the Arabs; we have to understand them... Through knowing the Arabs, you know yourself better.
So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer.
World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.
Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.
I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
We always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned?
We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.
The weapon of suicide bombing is so desperate that you aren't even left with the possibility of taking revenge or punishing anyone; the terrorist is killed along with his victims, his blood mixing with theirs.
Let us not forget: The Palestinians in Gaza are our permanent neighbors, and we are theirs.
One of the dreams of Zionism was to be a bridge. Instead, we are creating exclusion between the East and the West instead of creating bridges; we are contributing to the conflict between East and West by our stupid desire to have more.
At the heart of anti-Semitism lies Moses. He made a catastrophic error, a terrible mistake, and all anti-Semitism for two thousand years stems from his misjudgement. Moses said we Jews could remain a people without having a land. He said we don't need territory to hold onto our Jewish identity. This was a disaster.
I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.
The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.
I am a serious reader, and I read slowly.
The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.
