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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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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Stories
Concepts
Hierarchy
America
Writers
Introducing
Writing
Focus
Craft
Trying
Written
Badly
Something
Passion
Crafts
Good
Story
Turning
Sterile
Always
Write
Concept
Preoccupied
Around
Putting
Introduce

More quotes by Etgar Keret

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Etgar means challenge. And my family name is Keret, which means urban. So my name is urban challenge. My joke is, it's a good description of a birth but a strange name for a human being.
Etgar Keret
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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.
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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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.
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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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.
Etgar Keret
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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 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 think when you write, you should call it a writing spree. I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
Etgar Keret
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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
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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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I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Etgar Keret
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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 rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.
Etgar Keret
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When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.
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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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 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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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
Etgar Keret