Ismail Kadare Quotes

#1. Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible ... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#2. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#3. Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#4. This is where they keep the dreams about the end of the world, according to the inhabitants of places where the winters are very windy. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#5. I thought for a long time about leaving Albania, but at the same time to play a role in its life. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#6. In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#7. I am of the opinion that I am not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#8. In antiquity, there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#9. For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#10. The government can catch a hare with an oxcart! - Author: Ismail Kadare

#11. I consider I've had a good day when, among the lines I've written, I've produced from my innermost core what I call 'the appearance of the pearl.' That could refer to a discovery, a sense of harmonious cohesiveness, or something like that. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#12. Winter hurled more wind and rain at the city than it ever had before. Clouds dashed about in all directions emptying their thunder, hail and rain. The horizon was choked in fog. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#13. Every passion or wicked thought, every affliction or crime, every rebellion or catastrophe necessarily casts its shadow before it long before it manifests itself in real life. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#14. For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#15. Can one move an empire as if it were a house? - Author: Ismail Kadare

#16. We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#17. Can a country's people be better than its planes? - Author: Ismail Kadare

#18. Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#19. Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#20. Two or three times it occurred to Gjorg that all these men had killed, and that each had his story. But those stories were locked deep within them. It was not just chance that in the glow of the fire their mouths, and even more their jaws, looked as if they had the shape of certain antique locks. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#21. If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#22. My streets, my cistern. My old house. Its beams, floorboards and staircase creaked slightly, almost imperceptibly, with a dry, uniform, almost constant cracking sound. What's wrong? Where does it hurt? It seemed to be complaining of aches in its bones, in its centuries-old joints. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#23. I work only in the morning from 10 to noon. I still write by hand. I interrupt my writing when I feel that I've discovered something beautiful or, on the contrary, when I feel discontent. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#24. Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#25. Who can say it's not what we see with our eyes open that is distorted, and that what's described here isn't the true essence of things?" He slowed down outside a door. "Haven't you ever heard old men sigh that life's a dream? - Author: Ismail Kadare

#26. A mountaineer's house, before being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#27. It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#28. Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#29. And everything would be different, different. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#30. At street corners, where walls join, I thought I could see some familiar features, like outlines of human faces, the shadows of cheekbones and eyebrows. They are really there, caught in stone for all time, along with the marks left by earthquakes, winters and scourges wrought by men. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#31. For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression - rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, 'Spiritus,' it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#32. If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world? - Author: Ismail Kadare

#33. It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#34. They said 'ski', but they heard 'vodka'! - Author: Ismail Kadare

#35. The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#36. The days were heavy and sticky. All identical, one the same as the other. Soon they would even get rid of their one remaining distinction, the shell of their names: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#37. (In our city spring came from the sky, not from the soil, which was ruled by stone that recognizes no seasonal change. The change of the season could be glimpsed in the thinning of clouds, the appearance of the birds and the occasional rainbow.) - Author: Ismail Kadare

#38. This is how things come to pass in the world,' one of the princes is supposed to have said. 'Blood flows one way in life and another way in song, and one never knows which flow is the right one. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#39. If I manage to write something that I consider good and valuable in a particular place, that spot automatically has a special aura for me. In Albania, there are two cities where I have written the majority of my work: Gjirokaster, my home city, and Tirana. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#40. Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#41. Greater Albania?!", this is a mockery of an unprecedented cynicism. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#42. I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter. - Author: Ismail Kadare

#43. I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking. - Author: Ismail Kadare