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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

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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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Laptop

More quotes by Etgar Keret

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My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
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Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.
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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.
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You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.
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In my stories I can kiss the girls I want to kiss and punch the girls I want to punch. Nobody pays a price for it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.
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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?
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When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.
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What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams [less than two pounds]. I have a very heroic birth story.
Etgar Keret
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This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.
Etgar Keret