"This joy of life was inseparable from his whole character as a man. Gyurka was most interested in the human medium, the life of man, this densely complex middle ground between the celestial and the terrestrial. He observed and dissected human nature with a novelist’s awe-inspiring incisiveness. He adored its beauty so much that he forgave all its perfidies. In this ability – as in his bemused patience for this postmodern age of ours – he was aided by two legendary skills: his gift as a storyteller and his sense of humor, the fruits of which he generously shared with his friends and disciples. He was also a peerless practitioner of the ancient and very human art of conversation. While he was predisposed to be enraged by the vulgar and the grotesque – and he often relished in giving vent to his fury – most of the time he defanged these abominations by casting them into a glorious narrative or otherwise using his humor to turn them inside out."

"Our loss is immense and unfathomable indeed. But this is not the kind of loss that cries out to heaven or pounds at your chest causing excruciating anguish; it is a loss of the quiet, if profound, kind. This kind of loss will not swipe you off your feet, smite you down to the ground, or rattle you to the bone. It is the kind of loss that makes you realize you will not be able to get rid of this blunt pain over the absence of that man, that it will haunt you day by day, for a long time to come. I have always thought of him as the archetype of the citizen. If there has ever been a true incarnation of the human ideal as the writer Sándor Márai envisioned it, a lone survivor of this species, then it was certainly György Granasztói. He was also a model Hungarian citizen, who – while taking for granted the primacy of the spirit over matter, seeing man as more than a speaking animal after all – always avoided the pitfall of valuing intellect, erudition, and refined manners over upright character."