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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
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Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Mean
Identity
Always
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More quotes by 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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.
Etgar Keret
Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.
Etgar Keret
If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels right, use it. If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels wrong, don’t waste so much as a single second on it. It may be fine for someone else, but not for you.
Etgar Keret
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
Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn't find any meaning in life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time.
Etgar Keret
You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
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 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 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
I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
Etgar Keret
I think that, in Israel, the greatest fear that people have, and I have it, too, is fear of genocide.
Etgar Keret
It's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.
Etgar Keret
Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.
Etgar Keret
