Milan Kundera Quotes

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

And if there's anything movies can do in a way that I just love, and I love as an audience is, 'Show me something I don't know about. Show me something I haven't seen.'

I write to satisfy the story or poem or piece of fascinating research that speaks to me. To rub a sore, to resonate with joy, to answer a question no one else has satisfactorily answered for me.

Make something new, and define territory that's never been. I fall in love with shows because I've never see that before. I fall in love with new vocabularies.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers.

For me, the best moments in storytelling are the ones where I feel I'm discovering something.

There are so many avenues to explore and stories to tell. It's just about finding new ways of telling them.

To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.

Every story is different, so what is a detail in one might not be in something else. Diversity is something I embrace and love about my work.

I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

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

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.