Etgar Keret Quotes
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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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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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Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.
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I think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
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The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.
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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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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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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.
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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
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I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is fear of genocide.
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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.
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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.
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What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.
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Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.
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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.
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I've always had a very developed superego. I also had a very powerful id, but there was no ego in the middle. So writing was always like letters sent from the id to the superego, saying, "What's going on here?" What I loved about writing was that I was totally weightless. I was amazed at the fact that I could be myself without being afraid that anyone would get hurt.
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Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.
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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.
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In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.
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Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.