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 change your diet, someone will call you a traitor.

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

The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.

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.

I don't believe in binational states. There are wonderful examples of this, prosperous multinational states: Switzerland, Switzerland and Switzerland. Everywhere else - be it Cyprus, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, it ended in a terrible bloodbath.

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.