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
attitude animal compassion
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
character thinking people
... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
want weak i-want-you
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
children love-you thinking
Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.
lying secret littles
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
jealousy dog evil
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
laughing chaos
To laugh is to live profoundly.
Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain.
character meditation existence
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
lying chaos unbearable-lightness-of-being
On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.
animal paradise idyllic
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
love peace nature
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
ideas empires unbearable
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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.