1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

To put it another way, every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.