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Milan Kundera Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from Milan Kundera


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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.


Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.


I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.


For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?


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.


When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.


I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.


No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.


Man's world is the planet of inexperience.


Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.


Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.


I find myself fascinating.


Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.


There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.


To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.


I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.


Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.


The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.


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.


The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.