Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.

This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.

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.

In writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.

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

I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.

The Six-Day War laid a foundation of deep hatred toward Israel 50 years ago. I said this at a very early moment back then, when people were chanting about liberating ancestral land. I was quick to say that regardless of the future of these territories, liberated they are not, because the term liberation only applies to human beings and not to land, not to real estate.