"A one minute story by Örkény is an enigmatic something. It is not just short prose, it is a combination of many things, anecdote... short note, found object, tale, joke, parable, a little of everything. " "Örkény does not tell it, he comes out and says it. What he writes is philosophy, but it is not abstract. It is witty, but not convivial. Keen, unsparing, brutal - poetic. Wry, elegant, consistent - in short, Hungarian. " "From time to time, the one minute stories resemble post-Auschwitz poems that can't be written. " "A sad, much suffering man, this is how I have always thought of him. That he is my contemporary. That he is an Eastern-European, so ab ovo, he knows a great deal. A great deal, and - ab ovo - not enough. I thought I could see all this on his heavy, furrowed, laughing face. He died in 1979, over twenty-five years ago. This is when we are most apt to forget a writer. Örkény is the great exception. " From the Preface to More One Minute Stories by Péter Esterházy