It is wrong to take an 18-year-old boy or girl and arm them with machine guns and make them the almighty king of some little Arab village. No young man, and no old man either, should have so much power over the life and death of so many helpless individuals. It is corrupting. It sometimes provokes desperate, savage and indiscriminate violence among the occupied.

Universally, not only in Israel, people want to feel good about themselves. We all want to feel good to some extent.

The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.

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 moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. And, sometimes in very, very different places, because we all come from somewhere, especially here in Israel.

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.