Imre Kertész Quotes

1929–2016 Hungary

Imre Kertész (9 November 1929 - 31 March 2016) is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.

Hungary
Academics
Nobel laureates
Novelists

Also known as: Imre kertesz

Random Imre Kertész quote

51 quotes

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

Detective Story (2008)

On the other hand, what is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago.

Liquidation (2003)

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.

Detective Story (2008)

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

Detective Story (2008)

There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution.

Detective Story (2008)

Anyone who wants something else is Jewish.

Detective Story (2008)

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

Liquidation (2003)

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

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Detective Story (2008)

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.

Liquidation (2003)

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

Liquidation (2003)

Man is always a little at fault, that’s all.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

"But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile."
"Why?" Jill inquired.
"Because," Enrique reasoned, "one cant be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."

Detective Story (2008)

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.

Detective Story (2008)

Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.

Liquidation (2003)

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

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed.

Liquidation (2003)

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

Liquidation (2003)

Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.

Detective Story (2008)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Imre Kertész (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.