But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.

Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him.

Someone who does not draw strength from himself and who is incapable of finding the meaning of his life within himself will...seek the map to his own orientation somewhere outside himself-in some ideology, organization, or society, and then, however active he may appear to be, he is merely waiting, depending. He waits to see what others will do, or what roles they will assign to him, and he depends on them-and if they don't do anything or if they botch things, he succumbs to disillusion, despair, and ultimately, resignation.

We ask ourselves all kinds of questions, such as why does a peacock have such beautiful feathers, and we may answer that he needs the feathers to impress a female peacock, but then we ask ourselves, and why is there a peacock? And then we ask, why is there anything living? And then we ask, why is there anything at all? And if you tell some advocate of scientism that the answer is a secret, he will go white hot and write a book. But it is a secret. And the experience of living with the secret and thinking about it is in itself a kind of faith.

Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.