Etgar Keret Quotes

Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.

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.

I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.

As a child, I never wanted my parents to be unhappy, which meant that I would always contemplate what would make them happy.

During the war, there were people wishing me death, wishing my son death, wishing my wife death in very graphic ways. In the past, I would go overseas and I would say, "Israel is like my family: we disagree, but we're all brothers." I can't say that anymore, because life proves me wrong.

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.

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 write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.

I think that, in Hebrew, it's like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.

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

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.

I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams [less than two pounds]. I have a very heroic birth story.

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

I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.

If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.

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.

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.

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.

This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.

Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

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.

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.

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

When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.

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

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

I think tone gives birth to the story.

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.

What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.