Literary Birthday – 5 January – László Krasznahorkai

Happy Birthday, László Krasznahorkai, born 5 January 1954.

László Krasznahorkai Quotes

1. Letters; then from letters, words; then from these words, some short sentences; then more sentences that are longer, and in the main very long sentences, for the duration of 35 years. Beauty in language. Fun in hell. (Britannica)
2. I’m very happy and I’m very proud, because to be in the line which contains so many really great writers and poets gives me power to use my original language, the Hungarian language. (Nobel Interview)
3. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration… Inspiration to give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time because these are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before. (Nobel Interview)
4. This is my private thing actually, the writing. I normally never speak about what I write, and I never show to other wonderful writers and poets friends. I am writing a book and after that, I give it to my publishers and I need some time after that. (Nobel Interview)
5. I don’t sit at a work-station, meaning a writing desk, and I don’t stare at the laptop hoping to get an idea, but work in my head starting from the assumption that literature is my work. (The White Review)
6. I got used to beginning sentences in my head, and if they were promising I kept adding to them until the sentence came to a natural end. It was at that point I wrote it down. That’s the way I do things even now, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlikely times – in other words I am continually at work. I write everything down at the end. I don’t correct in the normal way because I’ve done all that in my head. (The White Review)
7. My so-called long sentences don’t come from any idea or personal theory, but from the spoken language. You know, I think the short sentence seems to me like something artificial, affected. We are used to very seldom short sentences. When we speak, we speak fluent, unbroken sentences, and this kind of speech doesn’t need any periods. (Guernica Mag)

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. His novels are described as difficult, postmodern works with absurdist, dystopian, and melancholic themes. He uses long sentences, no full stops, on hundreds of pages of words. His novels include Satantango and the surreal The Melancholy of Resistance. Krasznahorkai’s was awarded the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, given for his entire oeuvre rather than for an individual work.

Source for image: Miklós Déri, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krasznahorkai_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_(D%C3%A9ri_Mikl%C3%B3s)_(3x4_cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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