Quote

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

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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Life
Feelings
Defeat
Ends
Losing
Earth
Civilization
Assyrians
Feel
Game
Disappeared
Feels
Feeling
Roman
Going
Games
Authentic
Think
Dies
Decline
Thinking
Society
Disappear

More quotes by Etgar Keret

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I think that becoming a parent kind of made me try to be more responsible. And it made me much more stressful.
Etgar Keret
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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
Etgar Keret
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I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.
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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Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.
Etgar Keret
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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
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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
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People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.
Etgar Keret
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You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
Etgar Keret
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I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.
Etgar Keret
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In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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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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If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.
Etgar Keret
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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
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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
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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.
Etgar Keret
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Writing is a way of living other lives. It is a way of expanding your life. It's not actually living a different life, it just means that you're hungry for life. There are so many things you want to do.
Etgar Keret
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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.
Etgar Keret
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When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret