4 Milan Kundera Quotes on Literature

Milan Kundera quotes on literature

1. Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but cliches: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

2. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

3. 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.

12. In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.