Quotes By Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

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.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

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

I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

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.

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

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.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

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

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

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

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

There are no small parts. Only small actors.