I Know One Or Two Things About

Now, Israel Is A Fulfillment, And As A Fulfillment, It Is Flawed. The Fact That It Is Flawed Is Not So Much A Testimony About The Failures Of Israel. No, It Is A Testimony About The Nature Of Dreams.

In Some Of The Israeli Media, But Not All, They Read About Very Nasty Things Done By Israeli Settlers And Soldiers To Palestinian Arabs. This Is A Pain In The Neck For Many Israelis. They Say: Leave Us Alone, What Can We Do About It? Or They Say: Look At Syria, Look At Iraq, The West Bank Is Paradise By Comparison. I Was One Of The First To Say, Shortly After The Six-day War, That Occupation Is Corrupting. It Corrupts The Occupier And, In A Different Way, It Corrupts The Occupied.

When I Was Little, My Ambition Was To Grow Up To Be A Book. Not A Writer. People Can Be Killed Like Ants. Writers Are Not Hard To Kill Either. But Not Books: However Systematically You Try To Destroy Them, There Is Always A Chance That A Copy Will Survive And Continue To Enjoy A Shelf-life In Some Corner On An Out-of-the-way Library Somehwere In Reykjavik, Valladolid Or Vancouver.

There Are Certain Concepts, Which Exist In English, And Are Unthinkable, Untranslatable Into Hebrew And Vice Versa.

Literature Is About Telling Stories. Now, The Gift Of Literature Is That, In Some Lucky Cases, Reading A Novel Or A Story Makes The Reader More Curious, More Open-minded. It May Open A Third Eye In The Middle Of The Reader's Forehead.