Words matter. These are the best Imre Kertesz Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.
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.
A book is either autobiography or a novel.
I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.
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.
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?
I am no historian, but Hungary is a country which has never known democracy – and by that, I mean not a democratic political system, but an organic process which has mobilised the entire country’s society. In the case of Hungary, this development was blocked by the growth of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century.
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.
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.
If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.
