Life is one heck of an invention. It is better than the iPhone 4S and Coke Zero combined.

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 think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.

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

When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.

I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.