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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.

Etgar Keret

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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Sadness
Happy
Learn
Firsts
First

More quotes by Etgar Keret

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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.
Etgar Keret
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In the army you feel violated - there's no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.
Etgar Keret
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You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
Etgar Keret
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I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.
Etgar Keret
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People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.
Etgar Keret
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I think when you write, you should call it a writing spree. I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
Etgar Keret
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In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.
Etgar Keret
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I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.
Etgar Keret
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In Israel, there is this reduction of the political discourse to something that is very limited. It's as if you have that pitch that only dogs can hear. Sometimes I feel I speak at such a pitch that very few people around me communicate with what I'm saying.
Etgar Keret
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I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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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?
Etgar Keret
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What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.
Etgar Keret
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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 Keret
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What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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The fact is that everything I have in my pockets is carefully chosen so I’ll always be prepared. Everything is there so I can be at an advantage at the moment of truth. Actually, that’s not accurate. Everything’s there so I won’t be at a disadvantage at the moment of truth.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts yet. Being a compulsive storyteller, I always make up for myself discouraging stories about how such accounts will get me into embarrassing and time-consuming situations.
Etgar Keret
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When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret