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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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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Always
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Never
Parents
Would
Parent
Child
Happy
Wanted
Contemplate
Children
Contemplating
Make
Unhappy
More quotes by Etgar Keret
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
According to Gur's theory of boredom, everything that happens in the world today is because of boredom: love, war, inventions, fake fireplaces - ninety-five percent of all that is pure boredom.
Etgar Keret
Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.
Etgar Keret
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
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
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret
In the army you feel violated - there's no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.
Etgar Keret
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
People usually don't allow you to cut off their tongue.
Etgar Keret
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.
Etgar Keret
If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
Etgar Keret
I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.
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
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
Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.
Etgar Keret
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.
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
You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.
Etgar Keret
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
I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.
Etgar Keret
