Imre Kertész Quotes

There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward.

I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t.

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

I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence.

Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?

For Kingbitter the Hamlet question did not run “To be or not to be?” but “Am I or am I not?”.

Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it.

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.

Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.

He himself had said near enough exactly what was in the play. The only snag was that by the time that scene was played out in reality, almost word for word, the person who had written the play, and that scene in it, was no longer alive. He had committed suicide.

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.

Auschwitz, I told her, appears to me in the image of a father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz, and father, resonate the same echoes in me, and if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz.

Anyone who wants something else is Jewish.

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.

... mert ami valóban irracionális, az nem a rossz, ellenkezőleg: a jó.