Milan Kundera Quotes about Art

All Milan Kundera Quotes Adventure Age Ambition Art quotes Attitude Beauty Betrayal Brotherhood Certainty Character Childhood Children Choices Coincidence Compassion Culture Darkness Desire Doubt Drama Evil Fashion Feelings Film Funny Giving Goodness Happiness Hatred Heart Home Hurt Imagination Immortality Inspirational Joy Judgment Laughter Life Love Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Morning Nostalgia Passion Past Pleasure Reality Running Sadness Sleep Soul Struggle Stupidity Suffering Today Understanding Violence War Water Writing

Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

Milan Kundera

Art, Logic, Source

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Milan Kundera

Art, Imagination, Modern

"Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book editing by George Plimpton, Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), 1988.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Milan Kundera

Art, Strong, Passion

"Nesnesitelna lehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Milan Kundera

Art, People, Imagination

"Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book edited by George Plimpton, October 1, 1986.

...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

Milan Kundera

Art, Media, Opaque

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Milan Kundera

Art, Passion, Mean

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

Milan Kundera

Art, Children, Race