I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.

I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.

I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams [less than two pounds]. I have a very heroic birth story.

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.

I don't like the expression "writer's block" because I think it presupposes that you have a problem with your plumbing. I really think it's the other way around.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

The moment that you have a child - that you know that when he'll turn 18, he'll join the Army and go there for three years of compulsory service - then you can't help yourself of thinking about the future - speculating about it, dreading it or even being - trying to be more active to change it and improve it.