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
Milan Kundera quotes about
jobs men epic
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
crazy love-is crazy-love
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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?
affliction bears should
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
reason fragments existence
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
passionate body surface
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.
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?
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