Imre Kertész

A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all.

He liked the style, that wry gallows humor armed with the semblance of omniscience; a most serviceable style it was, the dialect of the initiated, protecting them from their disillusionments, their fears, their well-concealed childish hopes.

You just sit here and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.

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

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.

"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."

If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life.

The state is always the same. The only reason it financed literature up till now was in order to liquidate it. Giving state support to literature is the state's sneaky way for the state liquidation of literature.

Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error.

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

Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time.

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