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"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
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"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
"Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back."
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."
"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
"If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be."
"Authoring a book is the sound of your voice around the world."
"What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."
"Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
"They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live."
"The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers."
"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."
"Therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children."
"For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability."
"The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic."
"A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds lurk in the sky to pounce on a weasel or a mouse. You see that black cat, standing motionless in the grass. She is only waiting for an opportunity to kill. I detest all that naA ve respect for nature. Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as human, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror."
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