My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

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