Etgar Keret Quotes

It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.

I was 30 when I did 'The Matrix.' When you turn 30, your life and your world view change. I remember feeling relieved - it was like I was seeing things in a deeper way.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

I was angry and frustrated until I started my own family and my first child was born. Until then I didn't really appreciate life the way I should have, but fortunately I woke up.

When I wrote 'Runaways,' I was a naive kid who thought that all parents were evil. Now that I'm a wise old man with children of my own, I am certain that all parents are evil.

Parenthood is so wild in its ability to put a mirror directly in your face and force you to look at yourself long and hard. What a challenge this is, but also what an exhilarating gift.

As you get older, you come to a place in life where you can't just live in the present.

What having a child - and especially a daughter - has done is lifted more of the veil for me: allowed me to see things on another level compared to how I used to see them.

Once you are a parent, everything takes a back seat. It ceases to be a role. It is a reality. Once I had Ranveer, I realised that I was cracking under the pressure and that I cannot be a superwoman. I had to open myself to learning.

I'm always 20 minutes ahead of myself in my head. But being present - it's beautiful when it happens.

I honestly didn't always want kids - for a very long time, it just wasn't a path I saw myself on. I wasn't even sure I wanted to get married!

I stopped feeling nostalgia for the moment because I imagine myself looking back on it from the future, which really freaks me out.

I don't like talking past the next game. It's never served me right in the past.

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.

Everybody knows what they were kind of drawn towards or what they're gifted at and it's more of courage and looking at yourself and saying, "I'm going to try something and move back in that direction." So it's less of an intellectual problem and it's more of an emotional problem because as you get into your 30's and 40's you get addicted to a paycheck and a comfort and you delude yourself into thinking this is what my life is and you lack the guts to be honest with yourself and to make that change.

I think I'm more grounded, you know, and I know what I want out of life and I'm, you know, my morals are really, you know, strong and I have major beliefs about certain things and I think that has helped me, you know, from being, you know, coming from a really small town.

If you change your relationship with time, you will change your life. The most important time of your life is right now.

Look to see what you are doing today. Is this how you choose to define yourself? Look to see what you are thinking today. Is this what you wish to create?

I feel my life has more meaning because I am responsible for another life, although I don't have control over what Lucian - my son - is going to do. He's definitely going to carve his own way.

Have a baby, and you realize: The second you think you got sh-t figured out, you don't. It's the greatest wake-up call.

When I had kids I sort of went into a hole for a few years and I think when I came out of that, I started to really become myself and know what works on me.

I'm in a different chapter of my life. As time goes by and I grow older, I find that I need to just be quiet and think. There have been periods when I've locked myself away for days, but now it's different - I'm married and we have a daughter who is in my office the whole time.

I don't think too much about the future. Not because I'm hiding my head in the sand but because I figured out that whatever the future was going to be, the thing I had to do was to quiet my mind and open my heart and do what I could to end suffering.

I think my children have presented one of the biggest lessons so far in my life. It was only when my kids were born that I realized just how much I'd been living my life worried about what everybody thought of me and, even more strangely, worried about what I imagined other people might be thinking about me.