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
bad-company company
Sad company is bad company.
rust movement world
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
avalanches culture madness
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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.
rehearsal firsts unbearable
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
mistake choices matter
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
hard-times faces sincere
When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.
flirting promise guarantees
Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
kitsch forgotten oblivion
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
tombstone flower garden
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time..
expression creating individuality
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations
goodbye farewell thinking
Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
medicine people desire
His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.
degrees doe coincidence
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.