Antal Szerb said this quote

Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?''Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.''Hungarian?''Hungarian.''What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on?'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.''And where do you Hungarians live?''In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'.'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.

~ Antal Szerb

The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.

~ Antal Szerb

If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.

~ Antal Szerb

I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva.

~ Antal Szerb