We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

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.