Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kunderais a Czech-born writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores"...
NationalityCzechoslovakian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 April 1929
sides uniforms nudity
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
inspirational funny ambition
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
doe morality ethics
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
avalanches culture madness
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
self fascinating
I find myself fascinating.
memories lying taken
Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.
ideas may hammers
A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
thinking ideas mad
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
catholic empires prague
Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.
thinking facts entertainment
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
years long noise
Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
real men air
The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
animal compassion unbearable-lightness-of-being
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
beauty body-image goodness
How goodness heightens beauty!