Top 100 Etgar Keret Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.”

— Etgar Keret

2. “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

3. “If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels right, use it. If someone gives you a piece of advice that sounds right and feels wrong, don’t waste so much as a single second on it. It may be fine for someone else, but not for you.”

— Etgar Keret

4. “You’ll never know what’s happening inside the heads of other people.”

— Etgar Keret

5. “The reason I write is that I’m not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.”

— Etgar Keret

6. “I think tone gives birth to the story.”

— Etgar Keret

7. “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

8. “Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.”

— Etgar Keret

9. “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

10. “I think that, in Hebrew, it’s like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.”

— Etgar Keret

11. “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

12. “His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That’s when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn’t even an angel, just a liar with wings.”

— Etgar Keret

13. “I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content – kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.”

— Etgar Keret

14. “Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.”

— Etgar Keret

15. “Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn’t find any meaning in life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time.”

— Etgar Keret

16. “What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I’m second generation.”

— Etgar Keret

17. “My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.”

— Etgar Keret

18. “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

19. “Creating something out of nothing means making something up. But when you make something out of something, you take things that are already there, like an emotion, and you turn it into a narrative. The nature of literature is not to invent things, but to articulate what is already there. When you read a good book you don’t think that the author is making up lies, but you say, “Oh, yes, I know what he is talking about.” The fact that you know this means that it isn’t made up.”

— Etgar Keret

20. “During the war, there were people wishing me death, wishing my son death, wishing my wife death in very graphic ways. In the past, I would go overseas and I would say, “Israel is like my family: we disagree, but we’re all brothers.” I can’t say that anymore, because life proves me wrong.”

— Etgar Keret

21. “Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story’s going to catch you.”

— Etgar Keret

22. “My father – I once asked him what was his greatest achievement. He said his greatest achievement was that he fought in five wars in the infantry, always on the front line, and never hurt anybody.”

— Etgar Keret

23. “Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.”

— Etgar Keret

24. “Writing is a way of living other lives. It is a way of expanding your life. It’s not actually living a different life, it just means that you’re hungry for life. There are so many things you want to do.”

— Etgar Keret

25. “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

26. “If we’re a family and your brother wishes you death, it’s not a very happy family.”

— Etgar Keret

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Etgar Keret

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Etgar Keret

32. “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

33. “I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don’t want to get somewhere, you just don’t want to fall off your board.”

— Etgar Keret

34. “The fact is that everything I have in my pockets is carefully chosen so I’ll always be prepared. Everything is there so I can be at an advantage at the moment of truth. Actually, that’s not accurate. Everything’s there so I won’t be at a disadvantage at the moment of truth.”

— Etgar Keret

35. “For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.”

— Etgar Keret

36. “Why does a father have to protect his son?” I thought for a moment before answering. “Look,” I said as I stroked his cheek, “the world we live in can sometimes be very tough. And it’s only fair that everyone who’s born into it should have at least one person who’ll be there to protect him.”

— Etgar Keret

37. “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

38. “My mother, for example, told the German officer not to kill her. She’d make it worth his while. And then, when they were doing it, she pulled a knife out of her belt and sliced open his chest, just like she used to open chicken breasts to stuff with rice for the Sabbath meal.”

— Etgar Keret

39. “An awfully beautiful story, but it isn’t mine.”

— Etgar Keret

40. “Life is one heck of an invention. It is better than the iPhone 4S and Coke Zero combined.”

— Etgar Keret

41. “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

42. “It’s kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.”

— Etgar Keret

43. “In the army you feel violated – there’s no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.”

— Etgar Keret

44. “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.”

— Etgar Keret

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Etgar Keret

48. “If you scare somebody enough, they stop being rational.”

— Etgar Keret

49. “When I ask him if he thinks there’s a moral to his story, he says he’s sure there must be, but doesn’t know exactly what it is. “Maybe,” he says after a short pause, “it’s that this world is full of lizards, and even though there’s nothing we can do about it, it is always helpful to find out how big they are.”

— Etgar Keret

50. “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