Imre Kertész Quotes

There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution.

Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.

How can we do justice even when it concerns truth itself, since for me only one truth exists, my truth, even if it is a delusion, yes, my delusion; my delusion.

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.

My body is foreign to me that body that sustains me and will, ultimately, kill me.

You just sit here and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.

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 do what I have to do, although I don’t know why I have to.

Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz.

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

A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all.

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

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

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.

Anyone who wants something else is Jewish.