Etgar Keret Quotes

Quotes about:

• Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.

  Etgar Keret

  Funny, Ninja, Translate

  Speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,

  54 Copy quote

• Life keeps being a beautiful and frustrating experience.

  Etgar Keret

  Beautiful, Frustrating

  "Suddenly". Interview with Courtney Becks, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

  5 Copy quote

• If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.

  Etgar Keret

  Sadness, Want, Firsts

  12 Copy quote

• If you scare somebody enough, they stop being rational.

  Etgar Keret

  Scare, Enough, Rational

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Boredom, Fake

  Etgar Keret (2006). “The Nimrod Flipout: Stories”, p.55, Macmillan

  17 Copy quote

• You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.

  Etgar Keret

  People, Knows, Happenings

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Father, War

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  18 Copy quote

• To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.

  Etgar Keret

  Fall, Character, Destiny

  4 Copy quote

• It's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.

  Etgar Keret

  Thinking, People, Wish

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving, Advice, Sound

  7 Copy quote

• And she loved a man who was made out of nothing. A few hours without him and right away she’d be missing him with her whole body, sitting in her office surrounded by polyethylene and concrete and thinking of him. And every time she’d boil water for coffee in her ground-floor office, she’d let the steam cover her face, imagining it was him stroking her cheeks, her eyelids and she’d wait for the day to be over, so she could go to her apartment building, climb the flight of stairs, turn the key in the door, and find him waiting for her, naked and still between the sheets of her empty bed.

  Etgar Keret

  Coffee, Missing Him, Men

  13 Copy quote

• I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

  Etgar Keret

  Art, People, Needs

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

• The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.

  Etgar Keret

  Complaining, Hemorrhoids, Should

  8 Copy quote

• He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.

  Etgar Keret

  Mean, Air, Creating

  9 Copy quote

• When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in [my] stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I'm writing for myself as a reader. It's like when you dream a dream. I want to know what's behind the door. If I navigate, it's from a place that's totally intuitive.

  Etgar Keret

  Dream, Writing, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

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

  Etgar Keret

  Lonely, Writing, Fiction

  "Suddenly: An Interview With Etgar Keret". Interview with Courtney Becks, www.raintaxi.com.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Etgar Keret

  People, Stories, Type

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Anything Goes, Life Is

  "Parables of anarchy". Interview With Hephzibah Anderson, www.theguardian.com. February 12, 2005.

  8 Copy quote

• I have always thought that Heaven is a place for people who had had a good life, but that is not true. God is merciful and way too good to make it so. The Heaven is just a place for people who could not be really happy while living on Earth. I was once told that people who commit suicide are taken back on Earth to repeat life from the very beginning because if they did not like it once, it did not mean they would not like it the next time. But those who did not fit in on Earth at all, ended up here. Everyone comes to Heaven in their own way.

  Etgar Keret

  Suicide, Good Life, Taken

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Father, Optimistic

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  11 Copy quote

• Rabbits are played. Nowadays it's all about the turtles. Tell them it's a ninja, they'll freak.

  Etgar Keret

  Turtles, Rabbits, Ninja

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Scales, Schemes, Okay

  7 Copy quote

• I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.

  Etgar Keret

  Artist, Thinking, Misanthropic

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Strong, Son, Thinking

  "What Etgar Keret Learned From His Father About Storytelling And Survival". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. June 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Hatred, Emotion

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  5 Copy quote

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