Literary Birthday – 1 April – Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 and died on 11 July 2023.

Milan Kundera Quotes

1. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
2. The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
3. All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
4. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
5. To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
6. 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 echoes.
7. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
8. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
9. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
10. 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 was the Czech Republic’s most recognised living writer. He left the Czech Republic in 1975 and lived in exile in France. Kundera’s best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His works combined erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation. He used slipstream fiction techniques in his writing. Kundera himself claimed inspiration from Renaissance authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Miguel de Cervantes. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was nominated on several occasions. Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia. Kundera’s wide-ranging reflections appear in The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter.

Source for Image: Elisa Cabot, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milan_Kundera_redux.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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