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The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!

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
True
European
Great
Theme
Cervantes
Every
Entertainment
Entertainments
Think
Novel
Nostalgic
Thinking
Serious
Themes
Started
Novelist
Fact
Terribly
Facts
Novelists

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
Milan Kundera
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
Milan Kundera
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
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Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
Milan Kundera
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
Milan Kundera
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Milan Kundera
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera