Quotes from Etgar Keret

Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts yet. Being a compulsive storyteller, I always make up for myself discouraging stories about how such accounts will get me into embarrassing and time-consuming situations.

In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.

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.

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.

Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?

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.

If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.

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.

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.

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

It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.