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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Imre Kertesz Read Quote
No one in my family wrote. And there was no real introduction. I suppose I somehow blundered into it when I was about six or seven years old. I was asked what present I would like, and, without knowing why, I responded that I would like a journal. It was a beautiful journal – so beautiful that I didn’t want to sully it. Imre Kertesz Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization. Imre Kertesz Read Quote
The Holocaust survivor who knows Auschwitz through the experience of suffering observes it all from the perspective assigned to him. He keeps silent or gives interviews to the Spielberg Foundation, he accepts the compensation payments promised him after a fifty-year delay, or, if he is prominent, he makes a speech in the Swedish Academy. Imre Kertesz Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
