Etgar means "challenge." And my family name is Keret, which means "urban." So my name is "urban challenge." My joke is, it's a good description of a birth but a strange name for a human being.

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

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.

If you were to do the world championship of victimhood in modern times, then the finals would probably be between Jews and Palestinians. I think the Jews win: we, Isralians, go from the Spanish Inquisition to pogroms to the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion to World War II and the Holocaust - it's a horrible history. And if you look at the Palestinian world, victimized by every entity in the Middle East, they were massacred in every country. I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is this fear of genocide.

I don't like the expression "writer's block" because I think it presupposes that you have a problem with your plumbing. I really think it's the other way around.

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

I think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.