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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Write
True
Writing
Author

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
Milan Kundera
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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
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
Milan Kundera
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
Milan Kundera
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Milan Kundera
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
Milan Kundera
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
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We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
Milan Kundera
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
Milan Kundera
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
Milan Kundera
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
Milan Kundera
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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
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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
Milan Kundera
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Milan Kundera
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
Milan Kundera