Etgar Keret Quotes
-
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
-
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.
-
When I was a kid, I wanted to make my parents happy. I'd always say to them, "What do you want me to do? Do sports? Be rich? Be funny?" My mother would say, "Whatever we want from you, you already gave us - we wanted you to be alive, and you made it."
-
For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
-
According to Gur's theory of boredom, everything that happens in the world today is because of boredom: love, war, inventions, fake fireplaces - ninety-five percent of all that is pure boredom.
-
Etgar means "challenge." And my family name is Keret, which means "urban." So my name is "urban challenge." My joke is, it's a good description of a birth but a strange name for a human being.
-
The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.
-
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. I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic. When I see this kind of stuff, I think, they're smart, but I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
-
I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams less than two pounds. I have a very heroic birth story.
-
It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don't have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story; it's about what goes on inside your mind and soul.
-
I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.
-
As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.
-
He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.
-
Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.
-
I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
-
I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.
-
Collaborating with your wife is amazing because you are doing something together with a person you truly love and know and discover things about her in that process which you have never had discovered on other circumstances.
-
I remember a point in writing the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."
-
This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
-
Even as a very young man, I knew that my family is like a plant. Uproot it, and it will wilt. Pluck away at it, and it will die. But leave it to thrive in the soil, untouched, and it will weather both gods and winds. It is born with the soil, and it will live so long as the soil shall live.
-
The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.
-
I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
-
Apparently, I'm very, very popular in jails. They often ask me to come and speak.
-
For my mother, having a family was the most important thing in her life. In the Second World War, it was a challenge - surviving physically and mentally and finding somebody who you loved and who was willing to be with you.