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

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

Etgar Keret

ninja translate funny

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 war father

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

boredom fake war

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. I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic. When I see this kind of stuff, I think, they're smart, but I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

Etgar Keret

writing art thinking

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

missing-him coffee men

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

Etgar Keret

sadness want firsts

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

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

Etgar Keret

moments writing fiction

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

Etgar Keret

people art needs

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

schemes scales okay

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

creating air mean

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

mother sports kids

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

should writing thinking

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

optimistic father children

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

Etgar Keret

wish people thinking

Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together."

Etgar Keret

cells reading talking

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

Etgar Keret

ninja turtles rabbits

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

anything-goes life-is mean

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.

Etgar Keret

fighting strong writing

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

evil writing people