Etgar Keret Quotes

The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.

To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.

The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.

I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I have so many themes I want to explore, so many questions I'd like to raise and develop, and hopefully, I'll get to do just that.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.