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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?

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
Feel
Obsessed
Feels
Issue
Mean
Identity
Always
Writer
Issues
Friends
Jewish
American
Closer
Doe
Jew

More quotes by Etgar Keret

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You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
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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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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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People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.
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If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.
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Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.
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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What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation.
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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.
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As a child, I never wanted my parents to be unhappy, which meant that I would always contemplate what would make them happy.
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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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My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
Etgar Keret
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The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
Etgar Keret
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When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.
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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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
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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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I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is fear of genocide.
Etgar Keret