Etgar Keret Quotes

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

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 prefer writing originals.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

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

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don't want to do superficial stuff any more.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

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.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.

People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn't know anything about, and they just weren't working.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

When you spend time with your friends, what do you talk about? Those things which made an impression on you that day, that week ... I write stories the same way. Events at home, in school, at work, in the street, these are the bases for a story. Some experiences leave such a deep impression that instead of talking about them at the club I work them into a novel.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

I always write a story in one sitting.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.