Quotes

Tiggers don't like honey.

I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.

No sensible author wants anything but praise.

Bores can be divided into two classes; those who have their own particular subject, and those who do not need a subject.

War is something of man's own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so.

The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.

At the heart of anti-Semitism lies Moses. He made a catastrophic error, a terrible mistake, and all anti-Semitism for two thousand years stems from his misjudgement. Moses said we Jews could remain a people without having a land. He said we don't need territory to hold onto our Jewish identity. This was a disaster.

So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.

Jews outside Israel live in permanent contradiction. I think they should come home.

This is why I am a Zionist: because Diaspora leads to hatred and the Holocaust.

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.

Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries.

We always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned?

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

One of the dreams of Zionism was to be a bridge. Instead, we are creating exclusion between the East and the West instead of creating bridges; we are contributing to the conflict between East and West by our stupid desire to have more.

I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.

The weapon of suicide bombing is so desperate that you aren't even left with the possibility of taking revenge or punishing anyone; the terrorist is killed along with his victims, his blood mixing with theirs.

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

I am a serious reader, and I read slowly.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.