Quotes from Milan Kundera

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

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.

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.

How goodness heightens beauty!