Milan Kundera

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

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

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.  It is wrong then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight.   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.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?  [...] Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.  Only chance can speak to us

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by an aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.