“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
More from Milan Kundera on Writing
“The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.”
“Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.”
“But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”
“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“Literature is language charged with meaning”
Nora Roberts
6 quotes“You can fix anything but a blank page.”