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"Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's."
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"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"

"I could be accused of glamourising crime, the favorite question on all journalists' lips whenever they ask about anyone writing about such things. The answer to that must be an emphatic 'Yes'. We've come to expect our icons of the criminal world to be larger than life, better than anyone else at foiling the final capture scene. We all love a good thriller ...."

"Back then I had muscles on my muscles, I was tattooed and tanned, wore the tightest of jeans to accentuate my snakelike waist and the whitest of tight vests to accentuate my muscle packed torso. To top it all off, I had the nicest piece of eye-candy on my arm in the form of a stunning, long-legged, mini skirted blonde."

"Violence was second nature to the psychopathic and ultra-violent Stephen Moyle, who was already a seasoned street fighter, after having half his face torn off in a street fight with three other men."

"I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn't tell it like it was."

"Discretion is not the better part of biography."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera

"If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy."

"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."

"In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting."

"For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake."

"Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits.Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world!"

"The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility."

"And she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies."

"Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest."

"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."
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