MILAN KUNDERA

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.

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

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

I find myself fascinating.

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.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

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.

Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain.

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

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

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 successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

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.

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.

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

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

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

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

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.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.