I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.
Etgar KeretIt's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.
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 before my son was born, I didn't have a strong sensation for future. I was living in this kind of never-ending present.
Etgar KeretHe misses the feeling of creating something out of something. Thatโs right โ 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, thatโs never happened before.
Etgar KeretPeople 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.
Etgar Keret