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.

I have found that good taste, oddly enough, plays an important role in politics. Why is it like that? The most probable reason is that good taste is a visible manifestation of human sensibility toward the world, environment, people.

Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it.

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.