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.

Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.

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

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.

Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.

I think there are one or two things similar in Elizabethan English and contemporary Hebrew. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

The Jews have a powerful ally, America, but they do not really have a bigger family in the same way that there is a European family or an Arab-Muslim family. People who fail to understand this ambivalence will never understand this country. They will not be able to understand how Netanyahu could win the last election by saying the Iranians are coming, Islamic State (IS) is coming, the Arabs are coming, and the whole world hates us anyway.