Turn off your cell phone. Honestly, if you want to get work done, you’ve got to learn to unplug. No texting, no email, no Facebook, no Instagram. Whatever it is you’re doing, it needs to stop while you write... A lot of the time (and this is fully goofy to admit), I’ll write with earplugs in - even if it’s dead silent at home.

I was thinking a lot about myself and my own super inextricably Jewish boy link with my mother. I felt like even a Jewish spy would have this relationship, so yes, I was very much exploring this relationship of boys and their mothers, and Jewish boys and their mothers. Exactly that, the ridiculous lengths that a doting mother will go for her son, and the ridiculous lengths that - I will pretend this is distanced from me - the ridiculous neediness of a grown man for a mother.

To me, when one is writing sometimes about a very specific subject with very specific people, I feel like if that story doesn't cross over, it's not working. That's very beautiful to me, to be sitting in Berlin and there's an actor reading my book in German. I don't even know what's going on, except I know to feel my own rhythms in another language and say, "If this is going well, I think everyone should laugh around now." Then maybe there's laughter, and for me, it reminds me of how story can move around the world.

I taught everyone a very bad lesson at my publisher because they actually gave me deadlines this time and I'm now meeting them. I used to say, "Here's my book; it's six years late." I'm so much faster now, and work differently. With all the years of writing, I think I still draft as obsessively, but I think back to writing. On your first story, you start at draft one. On your second story, you start at draft ten. On your third story, you start at draft one hundred. If you need a hundred and eight drafts, you may write eight instead of a hundred and eight.

Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one.

I literally feel like books saved my life. I found these people. Me reading Camus and Kafka, all of the tortured teenager stuff of someone who's falling in love with books. These people, these writers had the questions. They may not have had the answers, but they're not afraid to look at the questions head on. It was just life-changing for me. Yeah, books, honestly, I can't even tell you. I feel saved by books; I feel like they let me be who I was and find the world I wanted to be in.

You know, and I don't say this, I'll say as someone who lived in Israel for a long time, let me call myself someone who spent six or seven years in Jerusalem, we don't need any more Americans flying over to fix things. They need to fix it. I'm someone who fell in love with the city and fell in love with a place, and has high hopes for everyone there, the good people on both sides.