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
historical criticism gestures
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
love-is bird magic
Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.
beautiful memories brain
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
novelists historic given
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
book arms unbearable
she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
daughter mother children
Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
reality people deaf
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
pleasure ambiguity greater
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
book knowing conviction
Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
dream needs imagine
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
relationship sex facts
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
feelings doe elements
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
wall dirty ideas
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
dazzle unbearable purpose
The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.