Etgar Keret Quotes
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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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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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The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.
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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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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 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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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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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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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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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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Apparently, I'm very, very popular in jails. They often ask me to come and speak.
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What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.
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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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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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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
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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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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.
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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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I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is fear of genocide.