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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
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Brünn
Novel
Border
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Novels
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Possibilities
Equally
Circumvented
Borders
Horrified
Characters
Crossed
Possibility
Fond
More quotes by Milan Kundera
Speak truth to power.
Milan Kundera
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
Milan Kundera
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
Milan Kundera
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
Milan Kundera
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
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Milan Kundera
She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
Milan Kundera
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
To die to decide to die that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
Milan Kundera
Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
Milan Kundera
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
Milan Kundera
The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
Milan Kundera
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
Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
Milan Kundera
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Milan Kundera
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Milan Kundera
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Milan Kundera
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
Milan Kundera
There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera
We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
Milan Kundera
