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"For the Swedish Academy, which will present Mr. Kertesz with the Nobel Prize in Stockholm on Dec. 10, this view is also what distinguishes his writing from that of some other Holocaust survivors. "For him, Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that, like an alien body, subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe," it said in its citation. "It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence."" more . . .

Nobel Lectures-Literature 1995 ". . .And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being." more