Quotes from Josef Å kvorecký

We may think we live for wisdom, but in fact we're living for the the pleasure wisdom brings us.

Artists hold out the mirror to the bruises on the face of the world.

There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one's dreams until some improbable future – a future inexorably shrinking away; where the fear that has pervaded one's life suddenly vanishes because there is... nothing to be afraid of.

A person's got to be scared all the time - of God, if there is one, and of looking like a fool if there isn't.

I have not lost the meaning of life, merely the illusion that life has a meaning.

Whatever happens, we'll all meet in that great card-index in the sky.

Because inside, people are dirty dogs. Everybody. The only difference is some people try to hide it and others don't bother.

The alchemy of time transforms everything into comedy. Everything. Even crucifixion.

Social conscience is a fashion, it changes every year.

I notice that the artists, if that is what they are, at the tables around, have noticed my Scandinavian. Their artist girlfriends have noticed her New York fashions. And I never cease to notice her beauty, sad, as all beauty is, because it is not eternal.

I knew damn well that nobody's ever really happy, or happy on time, since happiness belongs to the past.

Their is beauty everywhere on earth.

He belongs, as I do, to those who seek after meaning and he had discovered that meaning was no more than a gilded statue, a seven-day wonder, and a rather tasteless statue at that. … Meaning is a compulsive neurosis. It is only when the neurosis goes away, or we are cured of it, that we can live.

Bez urážky lze importovat jenom myÅ¡lenky myÅ¡lenkami, ne myÅ¡lenky zbranÄ›mi. Každý násilný conquistador pokládá obyvatele dobývaného území za ménÄ›cenné. Conquistou jim to dává najevo. Je-li tu vÅ¡ak nÄ›co ménÄ›cenného, pak jsou to myÅ¡lenky, které se umÄ›jí prosadit jenom zbranÄ›mi.

I was always, luckily, only a reader.

Write whatever you want. Danny, my dear friend, write and tell me what life really is.

Odml?el se, polkl, snažil se pÃ…â"¢emoct bolest, vÄ›domí života blbÄ› ztraceného. Ne vlastní blbostí.

writers who cast about for something new will scarcely ever be great, for great things could not have escaped the attention of earlier observers.

To me literature is forever blowing a horn, singing about youth when youth is irretrievably gone, singing about your homeland when in the schitzophrenia of the times you find yourself in a land that lies over the ocean, a land - no matter how hospitable or friendly - where your heart is not, because you landed on these shores too late.