Top 100 Etgar Keret Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn’t grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.”

— Etgar Keret

53. “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

54. “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

55. “When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.”

— Etgar Keret

56. “The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.”

— Etgar Keret

57. “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

58. “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

59. “He tells them that there is a line that separates killing bugs from killing frogs, and that no matter how hard it is, that line must never be crossed.”

— Etgar Keret

60. “In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.”

— Etgar Keret

61. “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

62. “I’m not saying that I don’t experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human.”

— Etgar Keret

63. “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

64. “The story I had written wasn’t the creased, stit-smeared paper now sitting in the bottom of the trash can on the street. That page was just a pipeline through which I could transmit my feelings from my minds to his.”

— Etgar Keret

65. “I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can’t find it in nature. It’s basically some kind of distortion of fear.”

— Etgar Keret

66. “The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he’s just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.”

— Etgar Keret

67. “The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.”

— Etgar Keret

68. “Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship – it’s totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws.”

— Etgar Keret

69. “What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people’s houses. It’s naive to think you won’t carry anything into your life.”

— Etgar Keret

70. “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

71. “The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.”

— Etgar Keret

72. “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

73. “No glue can make a person stick like that.”

— Etgar Keret

74. “Even as a very young man, I knew that my family is like a plant. Uproot it, and it will wilt. Pluck away at it, and it will die. But leave it to thrive in the soil, untouched, and it will weather both gods and winds. It is born with the soil, and it will live so long as the soil shall live.”

— Etgar Keret

75. “A typical thought by way of example: at night, when we say we’re going to sleep, and we get into bed and shut our eyes, we’re not really asleep. We’re just pretending. We shut our eyes and breathe rhythmically, pretending to be asleep, until the deceit grows slowly real. And maybe that’s how it is with death.”

— Etgar Keret

76. “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

77. “I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.”

— Etgar Keret

78. “Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.”

— Etgar Keret

79. “I like smoking pot, but I’m not the kind of guy who smokes every day.”

— Etgar Keret

80. “Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.”

— Etgar Keret

81. “Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.”

— Etgar Keret

82. “My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.”

— Etgar Keret

83. “The maxim that flying time is wasted time liberates me from my anxieties and guilt feelings, and it strips me of all ambitions, leaving room for a different sort of existence. A happy, idiotic existence, the kind that doesn’t try to make the most of time but is satisfied with merely finding the most enjoyable way to spend it.”

— Etgar Keret

84. “It’s funny, but I think my stories – the good ones – they’re much smarter than I am.”

— Etgar Keret

85. “You don’t need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.”

— Etgar Keret

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “When you work on a graphic novel or a film with people you’ve been together through a lot and you’ve exposed your secrets and weaker sides to each other.”

— Etgar Keret

92. “Rabbits are played. Nowadays it’s all about the turtles. Tell them it’s a ninja, they’ll freak.”

— Etgar Keret

93. “Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.”

— Etgar Keret

94. “This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn’t in the brochure.”

— Etgar Keret

95. “Apparently, I’m very, very popular in jails. They often ask me to come and speak.”

— Etgar Keret

96. “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

97. “As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people’s life.”

— Etgar Keret

98. “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

99. “I think living in Israel and wanting to change reality is the best prescription for never-ending writer’s block.”

— Etgar Keret

100. “I was first introduced to Kafka’s writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka’s fiction felt hyperrealistic.”

— Etgar Keret