from The Curtain, by Milan Kundera
. . . History, with its agitations, its wars, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, its national humiliations, does not interest the novelist for itself--as a subject to paint, to denounce, to interpret. The novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown.