Etgar Keret Quotes
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For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
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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.
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In my stories I can kiss the girls I want to kiss and punch the girls I want to punch. Nobody pays a price for it.
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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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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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You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
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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."
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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. 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.
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Apparently, I'm very, very popular in jails. They often ask me to come and speak.
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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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I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams less than two pounds. I have a very heroic birth story.
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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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Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?
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You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
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The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.
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If you scare somebody enough, they stop being rational.
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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 like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.
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The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.
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I think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
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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.
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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.
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What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.
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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.