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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"Sometimes I wouldn't give an interview because I didn't have the time or something else was more important. So they come up with a story which I don't think is always true, but they have to sell papers."
"So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore."
"You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler."
"And everything is controlled and everybody is a member of some committee, because then their watchdogs placed in the committees can control everything, what this person says or how this person think(s), you know."
"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."
"I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies."
"But I love fish, cheese and meat, and I eat everything, but only in small quantities if it's rich."
"But to be fair, if you take players from my era to now, the game has changed and the players have many more shots. They use them differently than we did. The speed of the game has changed."
"My dream is to have a beautiful old house in Monaco."
"I play a role in front of the cameras, just like in the movies."
"I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap."
"If consciousness can function independently of the body during one's lifetime, it could be able to do the same after death."
"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."
"Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena."
"People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways."
"Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
"It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people."
"Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time."
"We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places!"
"It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself."
"Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror." Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up."
"Six months later I was in Paris. I was 16, and it all started to happen."
"I've lived for 10 years in Switzerland, so I speak German."
"A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm."
"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."
"Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass."
"Humor: the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that conies of the certainty that there is no certainty.But humor, to recall Octavio Paz, is "the great invention of the modern spirit." It has not been with us forever, and it won't be with us forever either.With a heavy heart, I imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh."
"He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street."
"Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure."
"I was always at peace because of the way my mom treated me."
"I make money because I have to pay for everything apart from my school fees. My mother even makes me pay my own telephone bill."
"Ever since I was a very little girl, I've dreamed of acting."
"My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul."
"Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty."
"Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is - and that is the point I want to stress - that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word."
"Because I just loved to spend two years of my life in the company of Andy Kaufman and other characters."
"I remember in 1968 when we were in Cannes, in the festival, and we were supposed to be there 10 days, and the second day the festival collapsed because the French, you know, film-makers raised the red flag in the festival and ended the festival."
"Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with - no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do."
"By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market."
"I think it was the right time for me to retire because nowadays tennis is too incredibly fast and you can say that my style tennis went out of fashion."
"History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion."
"I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system."
"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 to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."
"People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still."
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