Milan Kundera

"Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with."

"As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."

"It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The 'Tell the truth!' imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman."

"Given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love."

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"

"In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."

"The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man."