Quotes from A. B. Yehoshua

Jerusalem doesn't belong only to Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews, but to the world.

I come from two parts of the oriental community - Jerusalemite and North African Jews.

I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently - his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics but poetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation.

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.

Let us not forget: The Palestinians in Gaza are our permanent neighbors, and we are theirs.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

I think about the Arabs not as enemies but as cousins. Even when we are in a fierce conflict with them, they are more of a kind of family - with all the problems of a family. We have to live with them.

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

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.

The malady of the Jews is that they don't see territory as part of their identity.

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.

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.

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.

For 50 years - that is, for most of my adult life - I worked tirelessly for the two-state solution in the face of countless frustrations, both on the part of the Israeli governments and the Palestinian Authority.

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

Israelis are the total Jews.

In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer.

World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.

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

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