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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

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
Helping
Piano
Two
Drunk
Music
Albums
Sonata
Really
Painting
Sonatas
Novel
Pianos
Getting
Percussion
Help
Ninth
White
Album

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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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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.
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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.
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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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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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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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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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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
Milan Kundera