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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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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
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Etgar
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More quotes by Etgar Keret

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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.
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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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The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.
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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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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
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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.
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Even as a very young man, I knew that my family is like a plant. Uproot it, and it will wilt. Pluck away at it, and it will die. But leave it to thrive in the soil, untouched, and it will weather both gods and winds. It is born with the soil, and it will live so long as the soil shall live.
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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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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.
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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.
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There were lots of lies along the way in life. Lies without arms, lies that were ill, lies that did harm, lies that could kill. Lies on foot, or behind the wheel, black-tie lies, and lies that could steal.
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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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Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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