Quotes by Milan Kundera

About Milan Kundera:

Milan Kundera is a Czech-born writer who has been living in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised 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."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love. (in that case my friend Hubl would have pointe out to me, no one loves us more than the police. That's true. Just as every height has its symmetrical depth, so l...

Milan Kundera

Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also enta...

Milan Kundera

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Milan Kundera

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Milan Kundera

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Milan Kundera

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

Milan Kundera

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

Milan Kundera

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

Milan Kundera

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Milan Kundera

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

Author Bio

  • NameMilan Kundera
  • DescriptionCzech author of Czech and French literature
  • BornApril 1, 1929
  • CountryFrance; Czech Republic
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Translator; Novelist; Playwright
  • WorksThe Joke; The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting; The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
  • AwardsAustrian State Prize For European Literature; Herder Prize; Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca; Medal Of Merit; Prix Médicis; Legion Of Honour; Vilenica Prize