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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
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Writer
Keret
Etgar
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Ninja
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Ninjas
More quotes by Etgar Keret
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
As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.
Etgar Keret
In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.
Etgar Keret
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
You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.
Etgar Keret
This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
Etgar Keret
I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.
Etgar Keret
Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.
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 used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Etgar Keret
I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.
Etgar Keret
I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.
Etgar Keret
There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.
Etgar Keret
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
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.
Etgar Keret
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
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
I 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 Keret
The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
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
