I've gotten used to so many symbolic interpretations of my work. Every fighting couple becomes a manifestation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. - Zeruya Shalev

The job of literature is to change the reader’s soul. I don’t want my readers just to enjoy themselves. I want them to go through some sort of experience that might change themselves.

You can feel the extremeness of Israeli society and life in my books without it being explicit. I only look for the individual experienced and give a taste of the complexity of life in Israel.

Encounters with pain and sorrow made me want to write. When I was 6, I was already writing sad poems about cats and dogs that had been killed and soldiers that were dying in war. It’s in my DNA.