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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

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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Brünn
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Predecessors

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
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we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
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The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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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.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
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