Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions. - Milan Kundera

I have no mission. No one has.

And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable.

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

"There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."