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.

Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves.

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

Things can be translated, but they become different.

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.

I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists. Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves "activists." They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary. In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.