I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.

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.

During the war, there were people wishing me death, wishing my son death, wishing my wife death in very graphic ways. In the past, I would go overseas and I would say, "Israel is like my family: we disagree, but we're all brothers." I can't say that anymore, because life proves me wrong.

Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.

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.

I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.