Etgar Keret Quotes
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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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For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
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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.
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It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.
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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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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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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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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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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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You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
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I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.
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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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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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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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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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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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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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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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You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
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If you scare somebody enough, they stop being rational.
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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.
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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 don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.