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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
Author
Write
True
Writing

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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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.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
Milan Kundera
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
Milan Kundera
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
Milan Kundera
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The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Milan Kundera
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
Milan Kundera
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
Milan Kundera
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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
Milan Kundera
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Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?
Milan Kundera
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Milan Kundera
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
Milan Kundera
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Speak truth to power.
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