My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace. I want Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and in peace with itself.

Universally, not only in Israel, people want to feel good about themselves. We all want to feel good to some extent.

That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.

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

My dream is much more modest than the dreams of the founding fathers. My dream is for Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself. This will be sufficient for me.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out.

Actually, who hasn't been through the ghastly experience of sitting in front of a blank page, with its toothless mouth grinning at you: Go ahead, let's see you lay a finger on me? A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant.