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Other authors named Milan:
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Author's popularity: -2
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Popularity: -2
Vote: | A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? |
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Vote: | Happiness is the longing for repetition. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | How goodness heightens beauty! |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I find myself fascinating. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Optimism is the opium of the people. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Solitude: a sweet absence of looks. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The best actors do not let the wheels show. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | The reign of imagagology begins where history ends. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There are no small parts. Only small actors. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. |
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Biography
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Milan Kundera is a Franco-Czech writer, born April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He has lived in France since 1975, and has been a French citizen since 1981.
Kundera, along with other Czech artists and writers such as Václav Havel, was involved in the 1968 Prague Spring, the brief period of reformist optimism that was eventually crushed by pro-Soviet forces. In his first book, The Joke, he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the Communist era.
Because of his criticism of the Soviets and their 1968 invasion of his homeland, Kundera was black-listed and his works were banned shortly after the Soviet invasion. In 1975, Kundera fled to France. There he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the Soviet regime in various ways. A strange mixture of a novel, a short story collection and a group of the author's musings, the book set the tone for his post-exile works.
In 1984, he released The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is his most popular work. The book chronicled the life of a Czech couple's difficulties adjusting to life with each other and to the Soviet occupation. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a moderately successful film version of the novel.
In 1990, Kundera released Immortality. The novel, his first written in French, was more cosmopolitan than his others with a more explicit philosophical (and less political) content and would set the tone for his later novels.
Kundera has repeatedly insisted that he be considered a novelist in general rather than a political or dissident writer; political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels (starting specifically from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) except in relation to broader philosophical themes.
Kundera's style of fiction interlaced with philosophical digression is also used by authors Alain de Botton and Adam Thirlwell.
Bibliography * The Joke (1967; Eng. trans., 1982)
* Laughable Loves, a collection of short stories originally published in the 1960s (Eng. trans., 1974)
* Life Is Elsewhere (1969; Eng. trans., 1974)
* The Farewell Waltz, 1976 (Previous title translation: The Farewell Party)
* The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979; Eng. trans., 1980)
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; Eng. trans., 1984). (film)
* Jacques and His Master
* Immortality, 1990
* Slowness, 1994
* Identity, 1998
* Ignorance, 2000
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Milan Kundera".
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