Milan Kundera Quotes

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It's exciting to develop that as a writer.

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.