Etgar Keret Quotes

However, the word madda in modern Hebrew specifically means science.

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

The revival of Hebrew, as a spoken language, is a fascinating story, which I'm afraid I cannot squeeze into a few sentences. But, let me give you a clue. Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

Years ago, I wanted to be like the girl Ne-Yo. You know, with the mid-tempo ballads - I come from the Babyface era. But that's not trendy; that's not hip-hop.

In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

The day Obama got into office, rap was less important because Obama gave kids an alternative. But will rap ever go away? No. There will always be a need for poets.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don't know how much experience you've had with contemporary Hebrew. It's quite difficult.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

Hebrew is the language I use to thank the Creator and, also, to swear on the road.

Writing in modern Hebrew is a bit like playing chamber music inside a huge, empty cathedral. If you are not very careful with the echoes, you may evoke some monstrosities.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

English is like music. The English language is really fit for singing. The notes match the feelings, and it makes sense.

When I write a song, I hear the music and words at the same time - one suggests the form of the other.

Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.

I really like hip-hop and rap; that's my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist.

Don't be afraid to wear fancy dress-up pieces with your everyday denim jeans/shorts.

I remember buying The Fugees' 'The Score' my freshman year and feeling like this whole new world and this whole new conversation was opening up to me.

There was a saying going around the theatre: It's a train, and you can jump on at any point whether you're a lover of musical theatre or a lover of theatre or a lover of hip-hop or a lover of history - there was a way to jump on the train.

My entrance to music was singing gospel in church, and to hear that gospel language in a hip-hop song was cool.

There's a heavy hip-hop influence in my music, some trap influence, but it's always lyrical.

There are a lot of country artists now that are heavily influenced by hip-hop. That's not me. I was very heavily influenced by rock & roll.

I grew up in a little bubble of Brooklyn in France! In Stains, I was learning to speak English; I was listening to Biggie Smalls and KRS-One, and so I basically lived the life by proxy. At the same time, I had the same problems and issues they were singing about right next to me, so it was easy to identify with it.