Etgar Keret Quotes

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

I'd like to think that if you find your audience there are still opportunities there to go and tell an original story.

There are a lot of celebrities that I think can get a little bit distracted by the way that our society views celebrity. All of a sudden, the film becomes about, "Come see this celebrity!" I'm not interested in that. I want to see a story.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.

I was keenly aware that I had a unique opportunity, a front row seat, on an unfolding story and nobody else was going to see it from quite the vantage point that I saw it.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.

I don't think I've ever really pursued telling my story, but I think things come to you at the right time.

I think it's pretty obvious that women's stories are not necessarily being told in Hollywood and women are not necessarily being put in the leadership positions they deserve in mainstream film.

But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.

I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.

I want my music to be able to tell a story about what I've experienced and what I think my fans will be able to understand also.

I think I've done a lot of movies that people would like to have seen a sequel to. But I grew up in a time when we didn't do sequels. You just did a movie because you wanted to do a movie and you wanted to tell a story. It wasn't to build a franchise.

What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'.

I don't think it takes a brain surgeon to understand how to read a story.

Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.

It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are

I think the thing I really got from Ginsberg was that you can tell a story through kind of painting pictures with words. And when I found out that you could have a profession doing that, it was thrilling to me. It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.

If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

I think there are a lot of great journalists out there. I don't find much fault in the journalist in general; I think everybody would like to break a good story.

I think the world should be represented on television and for the longest its been limited. Ethnic stories specifically need variety in content period.

Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. [...] Then make up your own story.