I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.

I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.

Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.

We supporters of the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine are now under a fierce attack from the far right and from the far left in Israel and in Europe. If I were a paranoid, I would say that maybe the far left and the far right are coordinating a conspiracy.

I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.

I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque.

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.