Etgar Keret Quotes

I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing.

Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn’t find any meaning in life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time.

Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you’re heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.

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.

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.

If you scare somebody enough, they stop being rational.

Rabbits are played. Nowadays it’s all about the turtles. Tell them it’s a ninja, they’ll freak.

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.

What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people’s houses. It’s naive to think you won’t carry anything into your life.

Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.

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?

Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story’s going to catch you.

When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in [my] stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I’m writing for myself as a reader. It’s like when you dream a dream. I want to know what’s behind the door. If I navigate, it’s from a place that’s totally intuitive.

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.

I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.

My father – I once asked him what was his greatest achievement. He said his greatest achievement was that he fought in five wars in the infantry, always on the front line, and never hurt anybody.

Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life – I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

In the army you feel violated – there’s no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.

The reason I write is that I’m not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.

If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels right, use it. If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels wrong, don’t waste so much as a single second on it. It may be fine for someone else, but not for you.

I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don’t like life, don’t trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.

If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.

In Israel, there is this reduction of the political discourse to something that is very limited. It’s as if you have that pitch that only dogs can hear. Sometimes I feel I speak at such a pitch that very few people around me communicate with what I’m saying.

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.

Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.

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.

The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.

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.

Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.

When I write a story, I have no idea what I’m doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you’re irresponsible – it’s a very liberating place.

I was first introduced to Kafka’s writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka’s fiction felt hyperrealistic.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

I don’t need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

You’ll never know what’s happening inside the heads of other people.

Before I started to make films, I didn’t give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

It’s kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.