1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the 'Ode to Joy' that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.

No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.

Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.

It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends

Lermontov became a soldier, escaping from her grandmother and her troublesome love. He exchanged the pen, which is the key to one's soul, for a pistol, which is the key to the gates of the world.

People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.

...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.