Etgar Keret Quotes

And she loved a man who was made out of nothing. A few hours without him and right away she’d be missing him with her whole body, sitting in her office surrounded by polyethylene and concrete and thinking of him. And every time she’d boil water for coffee in her ground-floor office, she’d let the steam cover her face, imagining it was him stroking her cheeks, her eyelids and she’d wait for the day to be over, so she could go to her apartment building, climb the flight of stairs, turn the key in the door, and find him waiting for her, naked and still between the sheets of her empty bed.

My mother, for example, told the German officer not to kill her. She'd make it worth his while. And then, when they were doing it, she pulled a knife out of her belt and sliced open his chest, just like she used to open chicken breasts to stuff with rice for the Sabbath meal.

The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.

You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.

I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.

I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is fear of genocide.

People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.

Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

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.

Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.

I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.

Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.

Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.

Writing is a way of living other lives. It is a way of expanding your life. It's not actually living a different life, it just means that you're hungry for life. There are so many things you want to do.

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.

Life is one heck of an invention. It is better than the iPhone 4S and Coke Zero combined.

I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.

As the son of Holocaust survivors, this is life - you're put in a corner, and you have to get out. I believe that you can always get out.

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

What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.

When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

I 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.

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.

In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.

For my mother, having a family was the most important thing in her life. In the Second World War, it was a challenge - surviving physically and mentally and finding somebody who you loved and who was willing to be with you.

The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.

What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation. My parents said, "We have a place where we can just be ourselves and nobody says, 'Don't tell me your opinion, you damn Jew, go somewhere else.'" Then you go to this country and other Jews tell you to shut up. It's frustrating. I think that we have a bad government and that some people are fearful. They're going with the class bully. But I really truly believe - you read it in my stories - that deep inside, people have goodness.

When you work on a graphic novel or a film with people you've been together through a lot and you've exposed your secrets and weaker sides to each other.

In my stories I can kiss the girls I want to kiss and punch the girls I want to punch. Nobody pays a price for it.

Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.

I never know the endings when I write. It's a turnoff when you know the ending. You lose much of your incentive to write when you already know. It's like seeing a movie a second time.

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."

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

Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn't find any meaning in life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time.

Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.

Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws.

When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — 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, that’s never happened before.

The moment that you have a child - that you know that when he'll turn 18, he'll join the Army and go there for three years of compulsory service - then you can't help yourself of thinking about the future - speculating about it, dreading it or even being - trying to be more active to change it and improve it.

I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students' stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.

I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.

For me taking a pragmatic decision when it comes to art is almost an oxymoron. The reason I first picked up a pen and wrote a story had nothing pragmatic in it.