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My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

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
Lonely
Biggest
Fiction
Firsts
First
Writing
Always
Love
Pastime

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Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.
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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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There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.
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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.
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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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As a child, I never wanted my parents to be unhappy, which meant that I would always contemplate what would make them happy.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.
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It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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