Etgar Keret Quotes
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If you scare somebody enough, they stop being rational.
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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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As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.
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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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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."
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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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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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For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
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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.
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You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
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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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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.
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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.
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Apparently, I'm very, very popular in jails. They often ask me to come and speak.
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I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
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Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.
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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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I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.
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This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
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I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
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I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.
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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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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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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.