 All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it. |
| I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage. |
| I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week. |
| I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity. |
| I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive. |
| A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel. |
| What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene. |
| It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism. |
| In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism. |
| Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev. |
| But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet. |
| To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction. |
| I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again. |
| And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man. |
| It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject. |
| Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it. |
| A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end. |
| Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up. |
| Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature. |
| As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge. |
