Playwrights From France

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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."

"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil."

"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."

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!" The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

"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."

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

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."

"The first step in liquidating a people," said Hubl, "is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."

"Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."

"He writes about his prick too much. Excuse me, boys. (What do you mean by that?) I happen to like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting very much. But this last book (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), it's really, it's as though he's been consumed by Western concerns. I think it's a corrupt book, I really do. I mean I really read it with great hopes because I really liked Laughter and Forgetting, I thought it was great. But I'm so disgusted. I mean who the fuck does he think he is? It's not that I don't think that a person can write about sexual obsession. I think there's not much more interesting than that in a way. I'm all for it. But it's so egocentrical and false, admiring her so much for this idiotic loyalty. (At the same time he's trying to use sex as a political metaphor.) Yeah, but so obviously. But I still like the other book."

"I particularly like the works of Milan Kundera such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His observations on human nature are more penetrating than those of Solzhenitsyn."

"As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom."

"Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it."

"He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her."

"She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place.""

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together."

"No love can survive muteness."

"(For Milan Kundera, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting". Are we losing this battle?) NG: One of the most truthful and profound insights ever made."

"Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable."

"You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."

"The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated."

"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?"

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."

"This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared."

"Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time."

"Kundera sees writers and artists as vital witnesses of the twentieth century as an age marked by tyranny, saying: 'People regard those days as an era of political trials, persecutions, forbidden books and legalised murder. But we who remember must bear witness; it was not only an epoch of terror, but also an epoch of lyricism, ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.'"

"It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go."

"What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March."

"Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

"In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it."

"The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

"Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch."

"Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”"

"Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."

"We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse."

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."

"Love is our freedom."

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme."

"Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

"I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare."

"To remember, if my Latin is correct, actually means to put the parts together. So that implies there are ways of losing parts. Kundera talks about this aspect of storytelling, too. In fact, he says that history, which is another kind of story, is often deliberately falsified in order to make a people forget who they are or who they were. He calls that "the method of organizing forgetting.""

"Goethe and Romain Rolland paint psychological landscapes, depicting both characters and spiritual conditions, but the Japanese-Flaubertian analytical tanka is a form alien to them."

"The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. ... Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. ... [E]ven Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges."

"That I have been allowed to exchange a greeting with you will remain a happy memory to the end of my days."

"Never do I hesitate to look squarely at the unexpected face that every passing hour unveils to us, and to sacrifice the false images of it formed in advance, however dear they may be. In me, the love of life in general predominates over love of my own life (that, indeed, would never have sufficed to bear me up). May life herself speak! However inadequate I may be in listening to her, and in repeating her words, I shall try to record them, even if they contradict my most secret desires. In all that I write, may her will, not mine, be done!"

"In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center."

"No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

"Of course, this entire fabric of Indian life stands solidly on faith, that is to say, on a slender and emotional hypothesis. But amid all the beliefs of Europe, and of Asia, that of the Indian Brahmins seems to me infinitely the most alluring. And the reason why I love the Brahmin more than the other schools of Asiatic thought is because it seems to me to contain them all. Greater than all European philosophies, it is even capable of adjusting itself to the vast hypotheses of modern science. Our Christian religions have tried in vain, when there were no other choice open to them, to adapt themselves to the progress of science. But after having allowed myself to be swept away by the powerful rhythm of Brahmin thought, along the curve of life, with its movement of alternating ascent and return, I come back to my own century, and while finding therein the immense projections of a new cosmogony, offspring of the genius of Einstein, or deriving freely from the discoveries, I yet do not feel that I enter a strange land. I yet can hear resounding still the cosmic symphony of all those planets which forever succeed each other, are extinguished and once more illumined, with their living souls, their humanities, their gods – according to the laws of the eternal To Become, the Brahmin Samsara – I hear Siva dancing, dancing in the heart of the world, in my own heart."

"The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe."

"The greatest human ideal is the great cause of bringing together the thoughts of Europe and Asia; the great soul of India will topple our world."