If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.

If you were to do the world championship of victimhood in modern times, then the finals would probably be between Jews and Palestinians. I think the Jews win: we, Isralians, go from the Spanish Inquisition to pogroms to the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion to World War II and the Holocaust - it's a horrible history. And if you look at the Palestinian world, victimized by every entity in the Middle East, they were massacred in every country. I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is this fear of genocide.

As a child, I never wanted my parents to be unhappy, which meant that I would always contemplate what would make them happy.

People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. It's all in the language, and that's one thing that doesn't translate.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

Life is one heck of an invention. It is better than the iPhone 4S and Coke Zero combined.

In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.