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Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.
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
Noticing
Translate
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Notice
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Ninjas
Good
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Ninja
Translations
More quotes by Etgar Keret
Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
Etgar Keret
When I was a kid, I wanted to make my parents happy. I'd always say to them, What do you want me to do? Do sports? Be rich? Be funny? My mother would say, Whatever we want from you, you already gave us - we wanted you to be alive, and you made it.
Etgar Keret
All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.
Etgar Keret
You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
Etgar Keret
Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.
Etgar Keret
I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams [less than two pounds]. I have a very heroic birth story.
Etgar Keret
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret
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
I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
Etgar Keret
I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.
Etgar Keret
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
Even as a very young man, I knew that my family is like a plant. Uproot it, and it will wilt. Pluck away at it, and it will die. But leave it to thrive in the soil, untouched, and it will weather both gods and winds. It is born with the soil, and it will live so long as the soil shall live.
Etgar Keret
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
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.
Etgar Keret
According to Gur's theory of boredom, everything that happens in the world today is because of boredom: love, war, inventions, fake fireplaces - ninety-five percent of all that is pure boredom.
Etgar Keret
Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.
Etgar Keret
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.
Etgar Keret
My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
Etgar Keret
I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing.
Etgar Keret
If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.
Etgar Keret
