Etgar Keret Quotes
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I think tone gives birth to the story.
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My father - I once asked him what was his greatest achievement. He said his greatest achievement was that he fought in five wars in the infantry, always on the front line, and never hurt anybody.
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My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
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He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.
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When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in my stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I'm writing for myself as a reader. It's like when you dream a dream. I want to know what's behind the door. If I navigate, it's from a place that's totally intuitive.
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My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.
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I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.
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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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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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I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.
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In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.
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I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts yet. Being a compulsive storyteller, I always make up for myself discouraging stories about how such accounts will get me into embarrassing and time-consuming situations.
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Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.
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As the son of Holocaust survivors, this is life - you're put in a corner, and you have to get out. I believe that you can always get out.
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I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.
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His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.
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I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.
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Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.
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Writing is a way of living other lives. It is a way of expanding your life. It's not actually living a different life, it just means that you're hungry for life. There are so many things you want to do.
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To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.
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I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.
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I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human.
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In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.
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For me taking a pragmatic decision when it comes to art is almost an oxymoron. The reason I first picked up a pen and wrote a story had nothing pragmatic in it.