It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.

What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation. My parents said, "We have a place where we can just be ourselves and nobody says, 'Don't tell me your opinion, you damn Jew, go somewhere else.'" Then you go to this country and other Jews tell you to shut up. It's frustrating. I think that we have a bad government and that some people are fearful. They're going with the class bully. But I really truly believe - you read it in my stories - that deep inside, people have goodness.

When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

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

In my stories I can kiss the girls I want to kiss and punch the girls I want to punch. Nobody pays a price for it.

What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.