“What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the f...”
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Author detail
Milan Kundera (1. dubna 1929 Brno – 11. července 2023 Paříž) byl česko-francouzský spisovatel. Od roku 1975 žil ve Francii, v roce 1979 byl zbaven československého státního občanství, roku 1981 získal občanství francouzské a v roce 2019 mu bylo vráceno občanství české. Texty psal nejdříve česky, později francouzsky. Do literatury vstoupil jako básník a dramatik, nakonec se ale stal celosvětově známým především jako prozaik a esejista. Jeho texty, zejména *Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, Nesmrtelnost* a *Žert,* se zařadily mezi nejčastěji překládaná česká díla ve světě. Svá pozdější díla ve francouzštině k překladům do češtiny dlouho nesvěřoval, první přeloženou prózou do rodného jazyka se stala až Slavnost bezvýznamnosti v roce 2020. ---------- Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929, Brno – July 11, 2023, Paris) was a Czech-French writer. He lived in France since 1975, was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, acquired French citizenship in 1981, and had his Czech citizenship restored in 2019. He first wrote his texts in Czech, later in French. He entered literature as a poet and playwright, but eventually became known worldwide primarily as a prose writer and essayist. His texts, especially *The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality* and *The Joke*,* are among the most frequently translated Czech works in the world. He did not entrust his later works in French to Czech translations for a long time, and the first prose work translated into his native language was The Celebration of Insignificance in 2020.
Quotes
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“What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the f...”
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“When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just...”
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“In this book time thus flows in a tempo opposite that of real life: the tempo slows down as the years go by.”
“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs an...”
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the w...”
“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, f...”
“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
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“When young people's education is at stake, compromise is crime.”
“Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by educatio...”
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“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.”
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“A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
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“Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.”
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“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will...”
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“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”
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“I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.”
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“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”
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“Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”
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“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.”
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“Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.”
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“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.”
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