The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.

I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing.

When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.

Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

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

You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.

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.