Coolness is temporary. You can't capture it or create it, it has to be discovered. It has to do with the people that are in a place, not with monuments or institutions. It's a momentary conjunction of personalities.

When you look at the science and the genetic studies that have been done on Palestinians and Jews, you find that there is a unity. They're both descended from the Canaanites. They're essentially the same people.

Chronology can be dangerous. You can get so linear that it becomes robotic for the reader.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me.

Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.

Having written Camp David as a drama, I could see the drama maybe a little more clearly when I wrote the book.