... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.

Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives--their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness.

No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.