Happy Birthday György Konrád!

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child. 

Der Mensch wird dumm und hässlich, wenn er keine Utopien hat.

If Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Cracow, Warsaw, and Berlin belong to Europe, then why not Leningrad, why not Moscow--indeed, why stop before Vladivostok? It is all part of Eurasia, there is no state frontier between...I would like to think of myself as some utopian son of Europe, able to touch the Pacific at San Francisco with one outstretched arm and at Vladivostok with the other, and keeping the peace everywhere within my embrace.

Die Zeit, sie ist die größte Übermacht. Allen Worten und Taten folgt ein Morgen, der sie einer Überprüfung durch Distanzierung unterwirft. Die Zehn Gebote oder die Magna Charta wurden vom nächsten Tag nicht verworfen. Es gibt Worte, die nicht veralten und aus dem Geschwafel herausragen wie Granit aus dem Sand.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

Künstler müssen sich zurückziehen können, sie brauchen Einsamkeit.

Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. . . . If you don’t like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days.

Many people feel empty, a world that seemed so strong just collapsed. Forty years have been wasted on stupid strife for the sake of an unsuccessful experiment. The values gathered together have vanished, the strategies for survival have become ridiculous. And so forty years of our lives have become a story, a bad anecdote. But it may be possible to remember these adventures with a kind of irony.

Two basic values, autonomy and solidarity, serve as helpful prompters in any decision-making process.

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

Courage is only an accumulation of small steps.