No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Biography
Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova ulice 6 (6 Purkyňova Street) in Brno Czechoslovakia to a middle-class family. Milan Kundera (Czech pronunciation: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]; born 1 April 1929) is the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer.

A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature he has been nominated on several occasions. Of Czech origin he has lived in exile in France since 1975 having become a naturalised citizen in 1981.