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You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
Etgar Keret -
People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret -
I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
Etgar Keret -
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.
Etgar Keret -
I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
Etgar Keret -
If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.
Etgar Keret -
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?
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret -
This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
Etgar Keret -
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.
Etgar Keret -
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.
Etgar Keret -
I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Etgar Keret -
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.
Etgar Keret
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You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.
Etgar Keret -
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.
Etgar Keret -
I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.
Etgar Keret -
Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.
Etgar Keret -
When you work on a graphic novel or a film with people you've been together through a lot and you've exposed your secrets and weaker sides to each other.
Etgar Keret -
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."
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret -
Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.
Etgar Keret -
All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.
Etgar Keret -
I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.
Etgar Keret