My books are often seen as political statements, but they're not. If I want to state something very directly, for example that my government should go to the devil, then I'll write an article or go to a meeting or go on television and say, ‘Dear government, go to the devil’ […] If I want to make a political statement, then I'll write one. When the question is less simple - when within me I hear several points of view - then, perhaps, I write a novel.

The Israeli writer must always position the present as a whole in the consuming context of a total history, and reconstitute the individuals of the present as agents but never as principals or sources of principle […] The Israeli Hebrew author resolves the putative historical order to a narrative order in which moral priorities are stated in reference to a cumulative series of oppressions and resistances superseded by the telos of the living utopia, the Zionist's Israel.

Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.

Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all […] And who knew what the British might do to us before they left? And after they had left, hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the lot of us in a few days. They would not leave a single child alive […]

[I]f I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some godforsaken bookcase.