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

Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.

I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.

What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.

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.

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.

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