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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.

-Etgar Keret

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My Mother, For Example,

Etgar Keret

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Last War, People Became Vocal From The Right-wing Point Of View: If You're Liberal, Then You're A Traitor.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I Think When You Write, You Should Call It A "writing Spree." I Don't Write Every Day, And I Don't Write Regularly.

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.

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

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.

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.

If We're A Family And Your Brother Wishes You Death, It's Not A Very Happy Family.

Life Keeps Being A Beautiful And Frustrating Experience.

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.

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.

It Took A Lot To Understand That The Interest In Both Writing A Story And Reading It Is Not In The Objective Dangers Someone Takes. You Don't Have To Fight Snakes Or Wake Up In A Strange Apartment To Have A Story; It's About What Goes On Inside Your Mind And Soul.

I Was First Introduced To Kafka's Writing During My Compulsory Army-service Basic Training. During That Period, Kafka's Fiction Felt Hyperrealistic.

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

You'll Never Know What's Happening Inside The Heads Of Other People.

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.

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.

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.

There Are Two Kinds Of People, Those Who Like To Sleep Next To The Wall, And Those Who Like To Sleep Next To The People Who Push Them Off The Bed.

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

You Don't Need To Use The Language Of God To Ask Where The Restrooms Are.

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.

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.

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