In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

Israel has obviously not liberated the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. We have occupied them, but we have not liberated them.

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.

Black Box is not a statement about injustice committed against Sephardi Oriental Jews or about the extremism of religious Jews or the lack of imagination of the old Israeli elites. It's a human story, in my view, first and foremost about a mystical communion between enemies. This is the inner story of the novel. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.

Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?

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.

On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.