Words matter. These are the best Etgar Keret Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life – I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.
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.
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.
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.
In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.
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.
In the army you feel violated – there’s no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.
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.
I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students’ stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.
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.
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.
Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you’re heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.
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.
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?
When I write a story, I have no idea what I’m doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you’re irresponsible – it’s a very liberating place.
