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
memories war people
The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
differences stones soil
When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
dog love-is men
The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
history reign ends
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
men immortality old-man
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
art matter ends
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
memories secret forget
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
speak speak-the-truth
Speak truth to power.
dirty wine people
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
men age body
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
dance partners
In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.
art children race
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.
country husband betrayal
Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?
mean ignorance ideas
Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas