Etgar Keret Quotes
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I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.
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I think living in Israel and wanting to change reality is the best prescription for never-ending writer's block.
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As a child, I never wanted my parents to be unhappy, which meant that I would always contemplate what would make them happy.
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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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I don't like the expression "writer's block" because I think it presupposes that you have a problem with your plumbing. I really think it's the other way around.
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If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels right, use it. If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels wrong, don’t waste so much as a single second on it. It may be fine for someone else, but not for you.
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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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There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.
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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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Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together."
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Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.
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If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.
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I never know the endings when I write. It's a turnoff when you know the ending. You lose much of your incentive to write when you already know. It's like seeing a movie a second time.
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People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.
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If you were to do the world championship of victimhood in modern times, then the finals would probably be between Jews and Palestinians. I think the Jews win: we, Isralians, go from the Spanish Inquisition to pogroms to the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion to World War II and the Holocaust - it's a horrible history. And if you look at the Palestinian world, victimized by every entity in the Middle East, they were massacred in every country. I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is this fear of genocide.
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In Israel, there is this reduction of the political discourse to something that is very limited. It's as if you have that pitch that only dogs can hear. Sometimes I feel I speak at such a pitch that very few people around me communicate with what I'm saying.
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You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
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When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
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I think that before my son was born, I didn't have a strong sensation for future. I was living in this kind of never-ending present.
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I think that, in Hebrew, it's like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.
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People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. It's all in the language, and that's one thing that doesn't translate.
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It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.
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I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.
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I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams less than two pounds. I have a very heroic birth story.