L'insostenibile leggerezza dell'essere by Milan Kundera

From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.As quoted in The Canine Hiker's Bible (2000) by Doug Gelbert, p.To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988).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.New York Review of Books (19 July 1984).A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral.Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven, pp.You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. 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 clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc.Quotes You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. 1.3 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).1.2 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979).

L'insostenibile leggerezza dell'essere by Milan Kundera