"Don't be afraid, sir. I don't like unnecessary truths. An unnecessary truth is the stupidest thing I know. For instance that we will die. Or that this world is rotten. As though we did not know all this. Do you know them, those men who heroically enter the stage to exclaim: This world is rotten! The public applauds but Jakub is not interested. Jakub knew this two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred years before them, so while they are exclaiming that the world is rotten he is trying invent for his master a few women with very large bottoms, the way his master likes it..." Life is repetition. Everything has been here before. "The one above (i.e. God) who has written all this repeated himself an awful lot, and since he has done so, he has probably been making fun of us..."

Life being a giant joke, perpetrated on members of the human race, is the main theme of Kundera's perhaps most profound novel Žert (1967)....

...There is no point in trying to revenge oneself. "Everything will be forgotten. There will never be any redress for anything."

The most traumatic experience of Ludvík Jahn is the realisation that his closest friends did not hesitate to vote for his expulsion from the Party because the Party had commanded them to do so. In a similar incident, the soldiers in the penal unit Ludvík served in ruthlessly subject an innocent individual to undeserved torment. Whenever Ludvík finds himself in a group of people, he always wonders how many of them would be willing to send their fellow mortals to death, only because the collective has demanded this....

...Kitsch is a beautiful lie, which hides all the negative aspects of life and deliberately ignores the existence of death....

..The starting point is a debate about the meaning of hedonism. Pleasure is defined, in the words of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, as absence of suffering. In the past, the notion of sensuality was associated with slowness. The slower one acts, the greater is the intensity of memory. The present-day obssession with speed is for Kundera an epitome of superficiality and emptiness. Kundera intensifies his criticism of contemporary Western civilisation which is manipulative, empty, without knowledge and without wisdom. The protagonists whom he analyses are spoilt, vainglorious and pretentious. Kundera contrasts their attitudes and their perceptions of reality and creates a grotesque image of the contemporary world...

... When Milan Kundera was young, like many of his young compatriots, he fell into the trap of destructive ideology. It took him almost twenty years to free himself from its constraints. The deep trauma taught him to assume a sceptically critical attitude towards reality. It taught him how important pluralism is. It made him realise that man is infinitely fallible and that he/she does not understand his environment.

Once Kundera left Czechoslovakia for the West, he was able to use the critical faculties he gained as a result of his traumatic encounter with communism, in order to compare and contrast the West European and the Central European experience in such a was as to uniquely elucidate important aspects of man's contemporary existence.

First of all Kundera has highlighted the contemporary crisis of language, a crisis of meaning and a crisis of communication. His novels are novels about various forms of delusion.