Imre Kertész Quotes

The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.

That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said.

If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family.

Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time.

But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.

I live and occasionally I look up at the glorious air or the clouds into which I keep digging my grave with my pen, diligently, like a forced laborer, whom they order every day to dig deeper with his spade…

Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.

The sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is faulty simply from a formal point of view, for anything that is has an explanation, even if by necessity a merely self-serving faulty, so so explanation.

Writers complete their works, whether those be thousands of pages long or just a few laconic lines.

I read somewhere; while God still existed one sustained a dialogue with God, and now that He no longer exists one has to sustain a dialogue with other people, I guess, or, better still, with oneself, that is to say, one talks or mumbles to oneself.

Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize me.

"No" — I could never be another person’s father, fate, god, "No" — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).

The state is always the same. The only reason it financed literature up till now was in order to liquidate it. Giving state support to literature is the state's sneaky way for the state liquidation of literature.

But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile." "Why?" Jill inquired. "Because," Enrique reasoned, "one cant be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy.

I had gotten into the habit of sleeping late because I had started to see that this was the only sensible way I could kill time.