Etgar Keret Quotes

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I think I'm influenced a lot by Drake in specific ways in my writing.

I love music. I love creating, so I just get inspired with whatever mood I'm in. Whatever the story dictates, that's where my mind goes.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

I like to write without being stoned. I like to have a hit or two and then go punch up the writing. I just see different things and hear different things. But it's nice to be working from the base that I wrote originally and then come to it with a little buzz. I can have a little wine from time to time. I have a hit from time to time, but those are the only things I do.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

Whatever is going on in your life when you're writing has to somehow seep into your work.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.