I’m personally involved in the apocalypse… It’s interesting how your relationship to that changes in the course of your life. You think about it most when you’re young, particularly in connection with death, because you still have a certain courage that you’re going to lose when your own death is getting closer. Later you’re just afraid. When I was young, I didn’t feel the sanctity of birth. I tended to consider birth as the starting point of a journey toward failure, and I’d sadly look out the window for days on end into this grey light that was all that had been given to me. Anything that could arouse compassion had a great impact on me. I was particularly responsive to those aspects of reality and the arts that reflected sadness, the unbearable, the tragic. And I didn’t know what to do with anything positive or joyful. Happiness bothered me.

I generally spend my days alone, I don’t talk much; but when I do, then I talk a lot and continuously, never ending a sentence. Many people are like that. You may notice that the majority of people talk the way I write.

Perhaps young people are the hardest to influence; perhaps they like to be seen as free, and they like it even more if they see someone confronting anything and anyone for their sake. For them, nothing has been decided yet. I think we’re talking about those who haven’t yet decided how to deal with their forebodings, or where to hide their imagination, their desires and their dignity in this rotten world we live in. We’re talking about those for whom a book is not just a book; they know that while we hold on to the book forcefully, there is something before the book and something after the book, and that’s what the book is for.

[...] so-called high literature will disappear. I don’t trust such partial hopes that there will always be islands where literature will be important and survive. I would love to be able to say such pathos-filled things, but I don’t think they’re true.

You’re forgetting that human history is full of catastrophes, and it’s the catastrophes that force people to think. 

When did I laugh last? When I saw and heard you, I laughed for joy. Because of the way you ask questions. Because you care. And because I again have someone to talk to. Someone I can tell these things to.

Bits of an interview with Krasznahorkai