Milan Kundera, (b.1929) is a Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet living in France. His works combine sexual comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation.
Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, now in the Czech Republic, Kundera was educated in Prague at Charles University and the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts Film Faculty. He worked as a laborer and a jazz musician before devoting himself to literature. For several years, he was a professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies. Zert (1969; The Joke,) his first novel, was published in 1967.
Kundera’s books were proscribed in Czechoslovakia following the Soviet military invasion of 1968. He immigrated to France in 1975, was stripped of his Czech citizenship in 1979, and became a French citizen two years later.
In exile, Kundera has emerged as one of the major European writers of the late 20th century. His novels, including Valčík na rozloučenou (1976; The Farewell Party,) Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,) and the semi-autobiographical Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being,) were published in France and elsewhere abroad but, until the fall of communism, were banned in his homeland.
Nesmrtelnost (1988; Immortality) was Kundera’s last novel written in Czech; he subsequently wrote in French. His wide-ranging critical essays appear in L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the Novel,) Les Testaments trahis (1993; Testaments Betrayed,) Le Rideau (2005; The Curtain,) and Une Rencontre (2009; An Encounter.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Milan Kundera
A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Travel
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Happiness
The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
—Milan Kundera
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Solitude
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Books, Literature
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.
—Milan Kundera
Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Animals
We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Names
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Anxiety
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
—Milan Kundera
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
—Milan Kundera
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.
—Milan Kundera
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.
—Milan Kundera
A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Anger
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Criticism, Critics
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Individuality
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Memory
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Goodness
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Humanity
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Kindness, Compassion
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Laughter
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions—love, antipathy, charity, or malice—and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Relationships
The only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate.
—Milan Kundera
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Stress
Optimism is the opium of the people.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Optimism
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Books
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
—Milan Kundera
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
—Milan Kundera
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Books, Literature
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
—Milan Kundera
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Blaise Cendrars Swiss Poet, Writer
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
Alfred de Musset French Poet, Playwright
Andre Maurois French Novelist, Biographer
Henri de Montherlant French Essayist, Novelist, Dramatist
Jules Verne French Novelist
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Jonathan Lethem American Novelist, Essayist
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand French Writer, Statesman
Emile Zola French Novelist