Etgar Keret Quotes
-
You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
-
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."
-
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 think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
-
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?
-
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.
-
I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams less than two pounds. I have a very heroic birth story.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
-
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
-
The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.
-
For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
-
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.
-
What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation. My parents said, "We have a place where we can just be ourselves and nobody says, 'Don't tell me your opinion, you damn Jew, go somewhere else.'" Then you go to this country and other Jews tell you to shut up. It's frustrating. I think that we have a bad government and that some people are fearful. They're going with the class bully. But I really truly believe - you read it in my stories - that deep inside, people have goodness.
-
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.
-
The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.
-
I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
-
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.
-
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."
-
I think that, in Hebrew, it's like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.
-
If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
-
I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.