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.

Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together."

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

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.

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

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

It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.