In the army you feel violated - there's no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.

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.

This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.

If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.

I've always had a very developed superego. I also had a very powerful id, but there was no ego in the middle. So writing was always like letters sent from the id to the superego, saying, "What's going on here?" What I loved about writing was that I was totally weightless. I was amazed at the fact that I could be myself without being afraid that anyone would get hurt.

As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.