Biography

October 5, 1936 · Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]

December 18, 2011 · Hrádecek, Czech Republic (respiratory failure)

5′ 7″ (1.70 m)

If you look at somebody for a long time and you encounter him over such a long time, on television in the evening, it will eventually begin to annoy you slightly. The person will begin to bore you, especially if he keeps repeating minority views.

[on his political power] When, for example, I said that I did not like a certain dog, there was always some overambitious person ready to shoot that dog. And that bothered me.

I am constantly preparing for the last judgment, for the highest court from which nothing can be hidden, which will appreciate everything that should be appreciated, and which will, of course, notice anything that is not in its place. I'm obviously assuming that the supreme judge is a stickler like me. But why does this final evaluation matter so much to me? After all, at that point, I shouldn't care. But I do care, because I'm convinced that my existence - like everything that has ever happened - has ruffled the surface of Being, and that after my little ripple, however marginal, insignificant and ephemeral it may have been, Being is and always will be different from what it was before.

[on Bohumil Hrabal] The first texts by Hrabal were absolutely breathtaking, like Jarmilka. It was a very short novel - it was rough, it was almost surreal, it was mysterious, it had a very tense note to it. Later, in the sixties, Hrabal started to be published-and his texts were smoother, more polished, cleaner, which resulted from the fact that, unfortunately, he listened to his editors.