Milan Kundera Quotes

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.

Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

Literature is news that stays news.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.