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

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

“The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be. ”

“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)”

“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.”

“[...] he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years."That's the only kind of book I can trust", he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”

“This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.”