I am religious by nature, I'm not a nihilist. I don't follow, I don't even know what the tenets of things like deconstructionism are, and all those schools that come up and their way of looking at things that people strive to incorporate into what they write. I don't even know what they are. Because I sense from a distance that I don't want to know. And therefore even if I had no politics, actual politics, my cultural point of view is hopelessly out of date with the modern literary sensibility. Which is nihilistic, and ironic, detached, cool, and cowardly.

La guerre, la guerre, everything la guerre. That's how I grew up. So for me, it's real. It's not something in the past.

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

World War II is the war that made our world. There's no question about that. The history of all the years in which I will spend my life, every single one, that is the seminal event of the history that we will experience.

I'm not afraid," Rafi said. "Why not?" "If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.

She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.

Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.