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 KeretI 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 KeretIf 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.
Etgar KeretI think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
Etgar Keret