Milan Kundera Quotes

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.

Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I don't write about myself. I'm never in my books.

Anyone can write your own life story.

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

I write about what happens to me. It's all there. I couldn't do it any other way.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.