“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!”

“There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.”

“English has more flexibility. It’s a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.”

“I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen.”

“I declare to all young men trying to become writers that they do not actually have to become drunkards first.”

“Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn’t seem to exist for me.” 

“You have to be humble enough to accept that you’re secondary to the author, and yet have enough chutzpah to take that other language and transform it.”

“I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.”

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

“When I was a child, everything used to come to me first as a poem.”

“Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.”

“You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.”

“Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.”

“I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.”

On a true fool natural: “He never stops being a fool to save himself; he never tries to do anything but anger his master . . . Hunter Thompson is a fool natural. Neal Cassady was a fool natural, the best one we knew.”

“What’s a revolution? It’s when a regime can no longer control the populace, when the regime is brought down to the ground.”

“I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.”

“They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.”

On feminism: “It's a point of view; it's a stance; it's an attitude towards life that affects, and afflicts, everything I do.”

“I’ve always felt that there’s a very thin membrane between madness, alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.”

“I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.”

“[Nabokov’s] language is made visible . . . like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.”

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, a provincial town in Hungary, in the Soviet era. He published his first novel, Satantango, in 1985, then The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016). 

“The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious—think of Cervantes!”

“One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don’t know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.”

“In some ways [the Internet]’s definitely an enemy.”

“If a word that was used by Flaubert or Césaire falls into desuetude, if it becomes passé, we still keep it in the dictionary because it was used by an important writer.”

“I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.”

“It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other.”

“The good effect of translating is this cross-pollination of languages.” 

“A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.”

On his father: “If I asked him for money, he'd say, ‘Are you going to publish some more of those books that I can't understand?’ And I'd say, ‘Yes.’ And he'd give it to me.”

“[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.”

“The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.”

“One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.”

“I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté.”

“Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it’s a good death. Make sure you’re not picking someone who just declined.”

“The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes . . . Nowadays, there are too many books and not enough good ones.”

“[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling—is like an encounter group . . . ”

“I’m gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.”

“I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.”

“. . . whoever you are, you've got to start from where you are. If you're a sailor, and only know sailor's language, well, write in it, for God's sake.”

On having his testimony discounted in court: “How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can't present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is, Stay out of court.”

“The book attained a mind of its own, a subjectivity or an autocatalytic machinelike quality.”

“I want to create absurd and hilarious, but also dark and revealing, edifices of language.”

“I’ve got the fucking gift for it. Instinct, call it.”

“A novel should reflect its society and its circumstances.”

Quoting Neruda: “I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.”

On American English: “It seems to me that the contrast between adjacent syllables has lessened and the result is an over-reliance on enjambment. Now enjambment is a fine, intellectually strong aid, but like all such things it becomes tiresome and calls too much attention to itself.”

“Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.”