Imre Kertész

Literary Birthday – 9 November – Imre Kertész

Imre Kertész was born 9 November 1929 and died 31 March 2016.

Quotes

  1. I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing.
  2. 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.
  3. I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!
  4. One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one.
  5. 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.
  6. I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.
  7. 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.

Imre Kertész was a Hungarian author. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. He is best known for his semi-autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust. He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature.

Source for quotes / quotes

Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kert%C3%A9sz_Imre_(Frankl_Aliona).jpg

Frankl Aliona, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 8th November 2020
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