Milan Kundera Quotes

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on.

Twitter is almost novelistic.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.