“Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone.”
Liquidation (2003)
Context: But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.
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Imre Kertész 61
Hungarian writer 1929–2016Related quotes
Harry Shaw Simpson. (2014). Music Today, p.300. Geni Book Publishing Experts. ISBN 0452616764030.
Variant: the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
Listening Beethoven's F minor Quartet; Quoted by Walter Legge, in Walter Legge: Words and Music (1998) edited by Alan Sanders
“A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly.”
August 16, 1773
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)
Nobel Prize Speech (1954)
Context: Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
“He was able to read and write like a well bred man.”
De Queyroz, the great Portuguese historian writing about Dominicus Corea - The Conquest of Ceylon (Volumes 1-6) By Fr. Fernao de Queyroz, tr. Fr. S. G. Perera, Ceylon Government Press, (1930)