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

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

Milan Kundera

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surrou...

Milan Kundera

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Milan Kundera

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a publi...

Milan Kundera

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence

Milan Kundera

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Milan Kundera

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for ...

Milan Kundera

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Milan Kundera

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

Milan Kundera

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Milan Kundera

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partne...

Milan Kundera

Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable ...

Milan Kundera

Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.

Milan Kundera

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were...

Milan Kundera

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signi...

Milan Kundera

Le roman n’est pas une confession de l’auteur, mais une exploration de ce qu’est la vie humaine dans le piège qu’est devenu le monde.

Milan Kundera

metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love

Milan Kundera

E qualcos'altro lo elevava: teneva sul tavolo un libro aperto. In quel bar nessuno aveva mai aperto un libro sul tavolo. Un libro era per Tereza il segno di riconoscimento di una fratellanza segreta. Contro il mondo della volgarità che la circondava...

Milan Kundera

Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.

Milan Kundera

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

Milan Kundera

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occa­sionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each ...

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