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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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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Different
Expanding
Writing
Hungry
Way
Actually
Things
Lives
Life
Living
Means
Many
Mean

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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
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It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don't have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story it's about what goes on inside your mind and soul.
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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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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I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
Etgar Keret
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You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
Etgar Keret
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Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.
Etgar Keret
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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
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I think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
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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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.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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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
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Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.
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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Collaborating with your wife is amazing because you are doing something together with a person you truly love and know and discover things about her in that process which you have never had discovered on other circumstances.
Etgar Keret
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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