Imre Kertész Short Quotes

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

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

Imre Kertész
Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;

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

Imre Kertész
The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imre Kertész
Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time.

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

Imre Kertész
Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer's sacrificing his life.

Imre Kertész
Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize 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
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
Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.

Imre Kertész
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 Kertész
Everyone here makes a botch of his life. That's the local specialty, the genius loci. Anyone who doesn't botch up his life here simply has no talent.

Imre Kertész
"Auschwitz cannot be explained." And yet, it doesn't take a Wittgenstein to notice that the sentence is faulty even from the point of pure linguistic logic;

Imre Kertész
I am still here, although I don't know why; accidentally, I guess, as I was born; I am as much or as little accomplice to my staying alive as I was to my birth.

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
"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 Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
For me this is a fact, writing is necessity, I don't know why, but it seems it was the only solution offered to me, even if it doesn't solve anything; still it doesn't leave me…

Imre Kertész