People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

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.

Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.

There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.