Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and a Mangled Quotation

Preparing for a class tomorrow (in which I'm teaching Philip Roth's marvelous novel The Human Stain), I was looking up a quote I remembered from an interview that Roth did with Czech novelist Milan Kundera. I remember it well; and I've seen it quoted many times. But -- so far as I can tell -- it's misquoted on both Milan Kundera's official website and on the NY Times web site (where the interview appeared). Here is the quotation -- both the question and answer -- as it appears there. (I cut & paste from the NY Times, but it looks like it's word-for-word the same on both sites.) I've bolded the relevant part:

PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?
MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out in the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

The problem is that this makes no sense: Kundera is praising questioning (as he does in many places in his work). Why would he say that "The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything"? He is in fact famous for saying the opposite.

And when I looked at the Lexis/Nexus archived version of the interview, it was reprinted as I remember it -- as it is often quoted -- and in a way that makes sense. Slightly, but crucially differently. The Lexus/Nexus site has the exchange as follows:

PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?
MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Now that makes sense: the quoted lines now fit with the rest of the paragraph, as well as with what Kundera is frequently quoted as saying (it's a famous quote), not to mention everything that I (at any rate) know of his worldview. Not to mention my vivid memory of reading it, in the back of my parents old paperback of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (The newer edition, which I have, doesn't have the interview reprinted -- alas.)

But why would both the Times and Kundera's own site get it wrong? I can only assume that Kundera's site took it from the Times site, and that it got mangled somewhere. (I can sort of imagine that: a line of type -- "...an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having..." -- got dropped somewhere, aided and abetted by the fact that "comes from having" appears twice.)

Anyway, I mention this for two reasons: first, to get the fact about the misquotation out (insofar as I am able) into the memeosphere, to try and correct what appears (to me) to be an out-and-out error on the part of two rather credentialed websites; and second, to ask if anyone knows how that did (or might have) happened. -- Any thoughts?

(Any irony about my looking for answers, given the content of the quotation in question, will be punished by my hitting you on the head with very heavy Philip Roth quotes.)