Milan Kundera Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Struggle, Book

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 2 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

• But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

  Milan Kundera

  Writing

• To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Mean, Doe

• The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

• The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Play, Doe

• In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Writing, Play

• While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Mean, People

• Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Writing, Epidemics

• When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Successful, Boys

• The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

  Milan Kundera

  Crazy, Book, Writing

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