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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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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
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Saver
Writing
Violated
Way
Recovering
Life
Territory
Army
Private
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Feel
More quotes by Etgar Keret
I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
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
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 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.
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
I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.
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
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
If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.
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
Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.
Etgar Keret
The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
Etgar Keret
I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation writing is the place where we can try to be human.
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 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
This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
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
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
The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.
Etgar Keret
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
