“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)”

“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).”

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“One must not put trust in novelists, Beth; they create worlds to fit their own needs and drive their characters mad in doing it.”

“Novelists don’t have answers and ones that do I'm not sure you should trust.”

“The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.”