"Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of ju...
The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.
~ Milan Kundera ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.
More Milan Kundera quotes
"This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected encl...
"He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivis...
"When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by ...
"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went...
"What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform...
"But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to pu...
"A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man...
"No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced th...
"In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice—he cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? S...
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with wall...
"You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running...
"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
"When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the enti...
"For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand ...