Making Up Characters And Places And Plots,

Sometimes, When You Are In A Really Constrained Situation, It Makes You More Focused About What You Want To Say And Where You're Heading. The Most Beautiful Love Poems That Were Ever Written Are Sonnets, Composed In A Very Constraining Form.

All My Writing-life People Kept Telling Me That I Should Stop Writing Short Stories And Start Writing Novels: My Agent, My Israeli Publisher, My Foreign Ones, My Bank Manager - They All Felt And Keep Feeling That I'm Doing Something Wrong Here.

During The War, There Were People Wishing Me Death, Wishing My Son Death, Wishing My Wife Death In Very Graphic Ways. In The Past, I Would Go Overseas And I Would Say, "israel Is Like My Family: We Disagree, But We're All Brothers." I Can't Say That Anymore, Because Life Proves Me Wrong.

He Misses The Feeling Of Creating Something Out Of Something. That’s Right — Something Out Of Something. Because Something Out Of Nothing Is When You Make Something Up Out Of Thin Air, In Which Case It Has No Value. Anybody Can Do That. But Something Out Of Something Means It Was Really There The Whole Time, Inside You, And You Discover It As Part Of Something New, That’s Never Happened Before.

Being Ambivalent Doesn't Mean That You're A Relevatist, That Anything Goes; It Just Means That You Show The Complexity Of Life. Life Is Always Complex.