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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Milan Kundera

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Memory

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

" Happiness is the longing for repetition. "

" For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? "

" Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. "

" 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. "

" Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. "

Milan Kundera

Listening

News

" Man's world is the planet of inexperience. "

" 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 hundred echos. "

" 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 endless length. "

" Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. "

" Optimism is the opium of the people. "

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

" Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. "

" Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. "

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

" The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. "

" You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. "

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

Milan Kundera

Anger

Him

" 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. "

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

" 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 never cease to astonish. "

" Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. "

" How goodness heightens beauty! "

" Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated. "

" Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud. "

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

" No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches. "

" Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. "

" There are no small parts. Only small actors. "