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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

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I Think The Typical

Etgar Keret

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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.

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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.

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I Think That Any Authentic Feeling One Has Of Life Should Be A Feeling Of Defeat. It's A Losing Game. You're Going To Die. Civilization Is Going To End. Our Society Is In Decline, And We Should Feel Ok About It Because Roman Society Was In Decline And Before It The Assyrian One Was, And They Disappeared Off This Earth And We Will Disappear Too.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Translators Are Like Ninjas. If You Notice Them, They’re No Good.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

The Amazing Thing About An Artistic Collaboration Is That It Is As Intense And Intimate As A Romantic One. Sometimes Even More So.

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.

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.

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.

I Think That, In Israel, The Greatest Fear That People Have, And I Have It, Too, Is Fear Of Genocide.

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.

In Israel, The Role Of The Writer Is Dictated By The Language In Which You Write. Writers See Themselves As Cultural Prophets.

As A Monogamous Creature, I Feel Sometimes That It Fills Up A Function That Affairs Have In Married People's Life.

Writing Is Very Castrating In The Moment. Fiction In General, It Has No Function, Nobody Asks For It.

If You Were To Do The World Championship Of Victimhood In Modern Times, Then The Finals Would Probably Be Between Jews And Palestinians. I Think The Jews Win: We, Isralians, Go From The Spanish Inquisition To Pogroms To The Fake Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion To World War Ii And The Holocaust - It's A Horrible History. And If You Look At The Palestinian World, Victimized By Every Entity In The Middle East, They Were Massacred In Every Country. I Think That, In Israel, The Greatest Fear That People Have, And I Have It, Too, Is This Fear Of Genocide.

Hebrew Is This Unique Thing That You Cannot Translate To Any Other Language. It Has To Do With Its History.

It's Funny, But I Think My Stories - The Good Ones - They're Much Smarter Than I Am.

If You Scare Somebody Enough, They Stop Being Rational.

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

Before I Started To Make Films, I Didn't Give Much Thought To The Way The Characters Were Physically Positioned In The Story World.

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.

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