All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

As the son of Holocaust survivors, this is life - you're put in a corner, and you have to get out. I believe that you can always get out.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Collaborating with your wife is amazing because you are doing something together with a person you truly love and know and discover things about her in that process which you have never had discovered on other circumstances.

Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts yet. Being a compulsive storyteller, I always make up for myself discouraging stories about how such accounts will get me into embarrassing and time-consuming situations.

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.