Milan Kundera Quotes
1929 -
More Milan Kundera Quotes
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Milan Kundera— Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ISBN 0-14-008500-9], pp. 217-218
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Milan Kundera— 1984 Title of novel.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera— New York Review of Books (19 July 1984)
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— As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988)
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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— As quoted in The Canine Hiker's Bible (2000) by Doug Gelbert, p. 8
Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým.
Milan Kundera— No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.
Milan Kundera— In Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 7
"Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly) to the cow."
Milan Kundera— From The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
Milan Kundera— Czech-French writer
