Quotes from Milan Kundera

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

a man possessed with peace is always smiling

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Dogs are our link to paradise.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.

The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

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