“At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why.”
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
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Imre Kertész 61
Hungarian writer 1929–2016Related quotes

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

Fiction, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", Orbit 10 (1972)

Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers, from This Bridge Called My Back
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

" My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (December 7, 2006).
Variant: Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.

“I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.”
Ibid., p. 353
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Eu não escrevo em português. Escrevo eu mesmo.