40 Quotes by Imre Kertész

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A book is either autobiography or a novel.