The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

Milan Kundera

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.”

How do we really know what we want? Milan Kundera on the central ambivalences of life and love:

Difficult Loves

Italo Calvino

“The life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”

Italo Calvino on photography and the art of presence – triply timely today:

Factotum

Charles Bukowski

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.