Etgar Keret famous quotes

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

#Ninja #Translators

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#War #Boredom #Fake

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Strong #Wish #Want

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Mean #Anything Goes #Life Is

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Writing #Gps #Surfing

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

#Writing #Emotion #Reason

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

#Writing #Stories #Language

When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.
-- Etgar Keret

#Kings #Hip Hop #Hips

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.
-- Etgar Keret

#Stories #Want #Way

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

#Writing #Army #Space

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

#Writing #Army #Training

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Strong #Writing #Fighting

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts yet. Being a compulsive storyteller, I always make up for myself discouraging stories about how such accounts will get me into embarrassing and time-consuming situations.
-- Etgar Keret

#Stories #Embarrassing #Discouraging

I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students' stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.
-- Etgar Keret

#Talking #Giving #Stories

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Army #Thinking #People

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Beautiful #Want #Sometimes

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?
-- Etgar Keret

#Mean #Issues #Identity

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Reading #Writing #Fighting

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Writing #Speech #Littles

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Dog #Israel #People

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Writing #May #Stories

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Lonely #Writing #Class

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Character #Independent #Stories

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

#Writing #Israel #Roles

For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.
-- Etgar Keret

#Kissing #Three #Looks

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

#Complaining #Hemorrhoids #Should

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Writing #Thinking #Needs

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Suicide #Good Life #Taken

You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
-- Etgar Keret

#People

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Mean #Creating #Air

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.
-- Etgar Keret

#Wall #Block #Grief

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Scales #Schemes #Okay

Rabbits are played. Nowadays it's all about the turtles. Tell them it's a ninja, they'll freak.
-- Etgar Keret

#Turtles #Rabbits #Ninja

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Men #Wind #Weather

His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.
-- Etgar Keret

#Liars #Angel #Wings

The fact is that everything I have in my pockets is carefully chosen so I’ll always be prepared. Everything is there so I can be at an advantage at the moment of truth. Actually, that’s not accurate. Everything’s there so I won’t be at a disadvantage at the moment of truth.
-- Etgar Keret

#Pockets #Facts #Moments

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Fall #Character #Destiny

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

#Character #Giving #Stories

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Giving #Advice #May

My mother, for example, told the German officer not to kill her. She'd make it worth his while. And then, when they were doing it, she pulled a knife out of her belt and sliced open his chest, just like she used to open chicken breasts to stuff with rice for the Sabbath meal.
-- Etgar Keret

#Mother #Knives #Stuff

There were lots of lies along the way in life. Lies without arms, lies that were ill, lies that did harm, lies that could kill. Lies on foot, or behind the wheel, black-tie lies, and lies that could steal.
-- Etgar Keret

#Lying #Ties #Feet

Writing is a way of living other lives. It is a way of expanding your life. It's not actually living a different life, it just means that you're hungry for life. There are so many things you want to do.
-- Etgar Keret

#Writing #Mean #Different

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Dream #Writing #Thinking

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

#Sadness #Want #Firsts

And she loved a man who was made out of nothing. A few hours without him and right away she’d be missing him with her whole body, sitting in her office surrounded by polyethylene and concrete and thinking of him. And every time she’d boil water for coffee in her ground-floor office, she’d let the steam cover her face, imagining it was him stroking her cheeks, her eyelids and she’d wait for the day to be over, so she could go to her apartment building, climb the flight of stairs, turn the key in the door, and find him waiting for her, naked and still between the sheets of her empty bed.
-- Etgar Keret

#Coffee #Missing Him #Men

There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.
-- Etgar Keret

#Wall #Sleep #Two

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.
-- Etgar Keret

#Fun #Grateful #Writing