Alter Ego

"This is the image from which he was born. (...) characters are not like people, of woman: they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility the the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something else essential about.
But isn't true that an author can write only about himself?
Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betrying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones. (...) The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That's why I am equally fond of all of them and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession: it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. "


Milan Kundera, The unbearable lightness of being