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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

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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Way
Making
Unlike
Write
Practicals
Seems
Practical
Character
Plot
Plumbing
Anything
Rational
Plots
Right
Places
Fixing
Needs
Characters
Genuinely
Writing
Written
Dishes

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.
Etgar Keret
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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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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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The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
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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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'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
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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
Etgar Keret
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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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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.
Etgar Keret
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I think that before my son was born, I didn't have a strong sensation for future. I was living in this kind of never-ending present.
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 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
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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
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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
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In the army you feel violated - there's no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.
Etgar Keret
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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