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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In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.
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For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
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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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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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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'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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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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People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. It's all in the language, and that's one thing that doesn't translate.
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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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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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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.
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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 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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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.
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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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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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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 have always thought that Heaven is a place for people who had had a good life, but that is not true. God is merciful and way too good to make it so. The Heaven is just a place for people who could not be really happy while living on Earth. I was once told that people who commit suicide are taken back on Earth to repeat life from the very beginning because if they did not like it once, it did not mean they would not like it the next time. But those who did not fit in on Earth at all, ended up here. Everyone comes to Heaven in their own way.
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I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.
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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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Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.