Etgar Keret Quotes

Emotions are the fuel to really move you along - that's the only way you can create music. If you don't feel any emotions, it's not going to happen.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

When a song wants to be written, it will be written.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

A creation needs not only subjectivity, but also objectivity.

The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.

Art is giving to what you create a soul.

I feel like every record I've ever made, on some level, is urgent.

Art finds a way to be constructive. It becomes heat in cold places; it becomes light in dark places.

Any of the decisions that I made, if one could actually locate a shape or form, were all within a wall, the landscape of music.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

To make art you need to be inspired.

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.