Quotes from Ivan Klíma

Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of.

I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.

...there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.

If you tell anything to a woman ... it's like putting it in the papers.

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.

..the writer's obsession - the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.