1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?

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

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.