“Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.”

“Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.”

“For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?”

“I had been given a wonderful opportunity to be a novelist — a chance you just don't get every day.”

“Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands (Salon, 20 February 2009).”

“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“I never had any ambitions to be a novelist.”