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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

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Etgar Keret
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 20
Actor
Film Director
Pedagogue
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Keret
Etgar
Right
Interest
Needs
Fact
Writing
Lives
Believe
Comes
Genuinely
Way
Write
Vocation
People
Facts
Affect
Stories
Maybe
Seems
Written

More quotes by Etgar Keret

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Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.
Etgar Keret
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When I was a kid, I wanted to make my parents happy. I'd always say to them, What do you want me to do? Do sports? Be rich? Be funny? My mother would say, Whatever we want from you, you already gave us - we wanted you to be alive, and you made it.
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
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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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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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As the son of Holocaust survivors, this is life - you're put in a corner, and you have to get out. I believe that you can always get out.
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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Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.
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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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.
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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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.
Etgar Keret
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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?
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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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 was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.
Etgar Keret
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It's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.
Etgar Keret
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Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.
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 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