Kay Ryan said that before writing poetry she reads some of the great European writers, including Milan Kundera, which led me to google him and discover these quotes. I'm not sure if I agree with him, and it is fun to wiggle the brain with his thought.
War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.
Milan Kundera
((b. 1929), Czechoslovakian author, critic. Paul, in "The Brilliant Ally of His Own Gravediggers," pt. 3, Immortality (1991).)
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
Milan Kundera
(Milan Kundera (b. 1929), Czech author, critic. Paul, in "The Brilliant Ally of His Own Gravediggers," pt. 3, Immortality (1991).
