Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.

Don't write about that which you don't know.

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".

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.

In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

The dreams and the visions of the Israeli founding fathers, these were very very ambitious dreams. They were world reformers. They wanted to create a new and improved kind of humanity, or at least, a new and improved Jewish society, a new and improved Jewish individual human being here. The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.

If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.