The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.

Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process-at once her own story and the tale of a nation.

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast.... So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.