When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.

The morning I woke up and it was announced that Trump was the elected president of the United States, I wrote to Angela Merkel. I said that she - at least for me - is now the leader of the free world.

The Palestinians have no other land. They are absolutely right about this. The Israeli Jews also have no other land and they are absolutely right about this. It is a tragedy of two peoples claiming the same very small country - very small, about the size of New Jersey. And both of them are right. Both of them have no other homeland as peoples. As individuals, maybe, but not as a people.

Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

All of my novels are democracies.

The Palestinians are not going anywhere - -they have nowhere to go. The Israeli Jews also aren't going anywhere - they have nowhere to go. But we cannot become one happy family, because we are not. So, we have to divide the house into two smaller apartments and learn how to say, "good morning" in the hall every day. Eventually, perhaps we will pop in on each other for a cup of coffee. But we need this semi-detached house, a two-family unit.