Imre Kertész Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
If one takes the path of success, then one ends up either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third alternative.

Imre Kertész
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.

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

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

Imre Kertész
At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn't know why.

Imre Kertész
The régime was overthrown, and I'm not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I'm not going to join in. I've become a spectator. And I'm not even spectating from the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the assumption I'm inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders, book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no reason, and I'm no hero, I merely botched up my life.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
There's just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that's a police revolution.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life.

Imre Kertész
Cognitively we don't know and will never discover what occasions the cause of our existence, we don't know the purpose of our existence and we don't know why we have to disappear from here once we have been placed here, I don't know, why I have to live this fragmentary existence, which happened to be my lot, instead of a life that perhaps does exist somewhere. Why did I get this lot? This sex, this body, this awareness, this geographic setting, this fate, this language, this history, this rented room?

Imre Kertész
I do what I have to do, although I don't know why I have to.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
"But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile."
"Why?" Jill inquired.
"Because," Enrique reasoned, "one can't be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."

Imre Kertész
I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!

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

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
"You mustn't forget about your future, Enrique."
"I'm living for the present, Dad."
"Ah!" he waved that aside. "The present is just temporary."
' I boiled up. "I know," I burst out. 'It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész