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"That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them."
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"The future is created by those who have a great imagination and the will to make it a reality by their actions."

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer."

"Skill gives you legs to jog, talent gives you legs to run, brilliance gives you legs to sprint, but genius gives you wings to fly."

"For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator."

"Imagination is a glorious wonder."

"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."

"Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did - but they only thought of it."

"I want to paint the rest of my days with the best colors."

"It does not need to be perfect - or technically correct - to be magic."

"What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera

"There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions — love, apathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. 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 débâcle — a débâcle so fundamental all others stem from it."

"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 walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."

"The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters."

"It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France."

"Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it."

"The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories."

"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."

"Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse?"
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