194 Quotes by Etgar Keret

Flights are expansive moments when the phone doesn't ring and the Internet doesn't work. The maxim that flying time is wasted time liberates me from my anxieties and guilt feelings, and it strips me of all ambitions, leaving room for a different sort of existence. A happy, idiotic existence, the kind that doesn't try to make the most of time but is satisfied with merely finding the most enjoyable way to spend it.

I mean, there aren't many inventions that actually succeed in meeting some human need. Ninety-nine percent of them are just some ugly combo of pushy marketing and spineless consumers.

There are clear rules governing the relationship between the homeless and the average person on the street: speak to each other politely; don't look each other in the eye; don't ask for names; and don't give more than twenty dollars.

The guy on the roof nods--it looks like this time, he heard something--and shouts back at me, "How did you know? How did you know she died?" Someone always dies, I want to yell back at him. Always. If not her, then someone else.

To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.

The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.

When I ask him if he thinks there's a moral to his story, he says he's sure there must be, but doesn't know exactly what it is. "Maybe," he says after a short pause, "it's that this world is full of lizards, and even though there's nothing we can do about it, it is always helpful to find out how big they are.

What is cancer, he thought to himself, if not a terrorist attack from above? What is it that God is doing, if not terrorizing us in protest against...something. Something so lofty and transcendental that it is beyond our grasp?

He invented ordinary things, and I stress, ordinary. Not brilliant, just ordinary, and that's exactly what humanity needs. Brilliant inventions might be good for brilliant people, but how many brilliant people are there? On the other hand, ordinary inventions are good for everyone.