Quotes from Imre Kertesz

If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one.

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?

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.

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.

In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.

I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.

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 tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.

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.

If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humans themselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with.

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.

Modern life is organised so that you benefit at the expense of the other, and the most extreme example of that is a camp.

A book is either autobiography or a novel.

De hecho, no sé si realmente creía en sus teorías. Hoy me inclino a suponer que sí. Uno tiene que creer en algo para alcanzar tal grado de vileza

Por mucho que escuchara, siempre hablaban de lo mismo, la libertad, pero no decían ni una palabra de la sopa. Yo estaba, por supuesto, muy contento de que fuéramos libres, pero no podía evitar pensar que el día anterior no había ocurrido nada por el estilo, pero teníamos sopa.

daß jenseits des Anekdotischen jede Geschichte und jedermanns Geschichte vom wesentlichen her gesehen gleichartig sei, und daß diese im wesentlichen gleichartigen Geschichten im wesentlichen tatsächlich alle Schreckensgeschichten seien, daß im wesentlichen alles Geschehen tatsächlich schrecklich sei und daß, im wesentlichen, auch die Geschichte schon seit langem nichts als höchstens eine Schreckensgeschichte sei.