Etgar Keret Quotes
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I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing.
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I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.
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In the army you feel violated - there's no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.
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My mother, for example, told the German officer not to kill her. She'd make it worth his while. And then, when they were doing it, she pulled a knife out of her belt and sliced open his chest, just like she used to open chicken breasts to stuff with rice for the Sabbath meal.
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Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn't find any meaning in life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time.
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Rabbits are played. Nowadays it's all about the turtles. Tell them it's a ninja, they'll freak.
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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.
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It's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.
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Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.
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I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students' stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.
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Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.
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Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.
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When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.
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What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.
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The fact is that everything I have in my pockets is carefully chosen so I’ll always be prepared. Everything is there so I can be at an advantage at the moment of truth. Actually, that’s not accurate. Everything’s there so I won’t be at a disadvantage at the moment of truth.
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I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
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When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.
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The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
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The moment that you have a child - that you know that when he'll turn 18, he'll join the Army and go there for three years of compulsory service - then you can't help yourself of thinking about the future - speculating about it, dreading it or even being - trying to be more active to change it and improve it.
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What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people's houses. It's naive to think you won't carry anything into your life.
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I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.
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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.
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And she loved a man who was made out of nothing. A few hours without him and right away she’d be missing him with her whole body, sitting in her office surrounded by polyethylene and concrete and thinking of him. And every time she’d boil water for coffee in her ground-floor office, she’d let the steam cover her face, imagining it was him stroking her cheeks, her eyelids and she’d wait for the day to be over, so she could go to her apartment building, climb the flight of stairs, turn the key in the door, and find him waiting for her, naked and still between the sheets of her empty bed.
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Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.