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What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people's houses. It's naive to think you won't carry anything into your life.
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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Army
Houses
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Lines
Shoot
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Break
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Experience
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Naive
More quotes by Etgar Keret
Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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
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
When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.
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
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 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
If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
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
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
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
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
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
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
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
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
I think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
Etgar Keret
Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.
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
