Milan Kundera

“Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.”

“I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.”

“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”

“To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.”

“Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.”

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”

“Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.”

“Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.”

“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundr...”

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”

“There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.”

“In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endles...”

“Man's world is the planet of inexperience.”

“No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.”

“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.”

“He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.”

“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

“When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm succe...”