I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists. Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves "activists." They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary. In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. 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. Everybody comes from somewhere.

There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.

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.

The alternative to fanaticism and to death is not some miraculous realization that someone has been wrong and he has to apologize. No, the answer to fanaticism and to death is curiosity and compromise and concession.

I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.