When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.