What I like about masturbation is that you don't have to talk afterwards.

Ideological pressure is much more crippling than commercial pressure. Crippling to your own freedom of thinking and creating, crippling the final results. If you wanted to succeed during the really hard-line totalitarian regime, you have to make so many compromises to please the censors that you don't recognize the original idea from the final result.

You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.

When you finish a film, before the first paying audience sees it, you don't have any idea. You don't know if you made a success or a flop, when it comes to the box office.

The Czech movies, the quality movies, are trying to show the life in the country as it is, in an entertaining way, while in America, the majority of movies are wonderful fairy tales.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.