Milan Kundera Quotes
-
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
→ -
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
→ -
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
→ -
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
→ -
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
→ -
Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
→ -
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
→ -
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
→ -
The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.
→ -
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
→ -
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
→ -
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
→ -
She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
→ -
When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.
→ -
All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?
→ -
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
→ -
You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
→ -
We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
→ -
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
→ -
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
→ -
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
→ -
Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.
→ -
Sad company is bad company.
→ -
The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
→ -
The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.
→ -
Beauty is a rebellion against time.
→ -
If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening".
→ -
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
→ -
Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.
→ -
Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
→
Related Authors
-
Philip Roth Novelist -
Josef Skvorecky Writer -
Umberto Eco Essayist -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Lawrence Durrell Novelist -
Albert Camus Author -
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Novelist -
Franz Kafka Writer -
Philip Kaufman Film director -
Vaclav Havel Former President of Czechoslovakia -
Marguerite Duras Writer -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Emile M. Cioran Philosopher -
Vladimir Nabokov Novelist -
Mario Vargas Llosa Writer -
Haruki Murakami Writer -
Italo Calvino Journalist -
Fyodor Dostoevsky Novelist -
Gunter Grass Novelist -
Bohumil Hrabal Writer