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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

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Collaborating With Your Wife

Etgar Keret

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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.

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This Idea Where, In This Safe Haven For Jews, Jews Will Threaten To Kill Other Jews, It Wasn't In The Brochure.

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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."

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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.

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.

Rabbits Are Played. Nowadays It's All About The Turtles. Tell Them It's A Ninja, They'll Freak.

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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.

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I Think Tone Gives Birth To The Story.

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.

When I Started Writing My Stories, I Thought That Not Only Nobody Outside My Language, But Nobody Outside My Neighbourhood Would Get Them.

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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.

The One Who Swallows Cactuses With Spines Should Not Complain About Hemorrhoids.

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Often In Writing Programs, Articulation And Clarity Are More Important Than What You Actually Say.

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.

The Moment That You Have A Child - That You Know That When He'll Turn 18, He'll Join The Army And Go There For Three Years Of Compulsory Service - Then You Can't Help Yourself Of Thinking About The Future - Speculating About It, Dreading It Or Even Being - Trying To Be More Active To Change It And Improve It.

If You Want To Learn How To Be Happy, You Have To Know What Is Sadness First.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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 Think Living In Israel And Wanting To Change Reality Is The Best Prescription For Never-ending Writer's Block.

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Hebrew Was Frozen, Like Frozen Peas, Fresh Out Of The Bible.

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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.

Sometimes The Stories Are Smarter Than Me, And Suddenly These Things Start To Make Sense.

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I Usually Start Writing Stories From Tone And Not From Content - Kind Of Like People Who Create Music And Invent The Lyrics Later On.

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 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.

Apparently, I'm Very, Very Popular In Jails. They Often Ask Me To Come And Speak.

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.

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.

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.

It's Kind Of A Reflex For Me To Ignore My Own Wishes And Think About Other People First.

In The Army You Feel Violated - There's No Private Space. Writing Was A Life-saver, A Way Of Recovering Private Territory.

I Think That, In Hebrew, It's Like The Language Creates A More Unique And Specific Universe Even Before The Story.

My First And Biggest Love Was Always Fiction Writing. But It Is A Very Lonely Pastime.

I've Always Had A Very Developed Superego. I Also Had A Very Powerful Id, But There Was No Ego In The Middle. So Writing Was Always Like Letters Sent From The Id To The Superego, Saying, "what's Going On Here?" What I Loved About Writing Was That I Was Totally Weightless. I Was Amazed At The Fact That I Could Be Myself Without Being Afraid That Anyone Would Get Hurt.

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.

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.

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.

For Three Months, A Person Sits And Looks At You, Imagining A Kiss.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When My Works Are Being Translated, I Always Get This Question From My Translators: Up Or Down? Which Means, Should It Sound Biblical And Highbrow, Or Should We Take It All Down To Sound Colloquial? In Hebrew, It's Both All The Time. People In Israel Would Write In A High Register, They Wouldn't Write Colloquial Speech. I Do A Special Take On Colloquial Speech.

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.

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