Top 34 Imre Kertesz Quotes
#1. You just sit there 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.
Imre Kertesz
#2. If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.
Imre Kertesz
#3. Talking is not enough; words don't clarify anything. I'll have to hit upon something, but what?
Imre Kertesz
#4. I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.
Imre Kertesz
#5. It was not very likely, of course, but then all kinds of things are possible, after all.
Imre Kertesz
#6. Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.
Imre Kertesz
#7. I came from two harsh dictatorships, Nazi and Stalinist. I never thought of becoming a writer as such, yet in a lucid moment, I recognised what I had to do.
Imre Kertesz
#8. Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.
Imre Kertesz
#9. Modern life is organised so that you benefit at the expense of the other, and the most extreme example of that is a camp.
Imre Kertesz
#11. I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.
Imre Kertesz
#12. It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries?
Imre Kertesz
#13. A book is either autobiography or a novel.
Imre Kertesz
#14. I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.
Imre Kertesz
#15. Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
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.
Imre Kertesz
#16. Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
Imre Kertesz
#17. One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one.
Imre Kertesz
#18. I can see the young man on dizzily autumn mornings, the fog of which he inhaled just like the rapidly evaporating freedom.
Imre Kertesz
#19. I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.
Imre Kertesz
#20. I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.
Imre Kertesz
#21. I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#22. A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.
Imre Kertesz
#23. The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.
Imre Kertesz
#24. I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!
Imre Kertesz
#25. Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.
Imre Kertesz
#26. 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).
Imre Kertesz
#27. There's just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that's a police revolution.
Imre Kertesz
#28. 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.
Imre Kertesz
#29. In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.
Imre Kertesz
#30. What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.
Imre Kertesz
#31. I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
Imre Kertesz
#32. When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.
Imre Kertesz
#33. Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.
Imre Kertesz
#34. The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.
Imre Kertesz
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