Prague is the Paris of the '90s.
So I left with Jean Claude and went to Paris, so when the Russians came to Prague, I was in Paris.
I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire.
We had a poster of the Davis Cup in 1986. It was in Prague, the Czech Republic against Sweden, and we went to watch, so I got the poster. You couldn't get all the posters. You were lucky if you got one.
By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market.
Prague is a dark place.
The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about 'socialism with a human face.'
My worst memory is of my first dance lesson as a 14-year old in Prague. My mother put me in this silver and pink lame dress. My hair was all curled, and it was the first time I wore a garter belt. I felt so out of place!
Regarding 'Ferris Bueller,' I was in the Czech Republic once, in Prague, making a movie at the same time as Jeffrey Jones, who played the principal, who was making a different movie. The Super Bowl was going to be playing at this bar at midnight, so we decided we would go watch the Super Bowl at this bar at midnight in Prague together.
Prague is like a vertical Venice steps everywhere.
When I sang my American folk melodies in Budapest, Prague, Tiflis, Moscow, Oslo, or the Hebrides or on the Spanish front, the people understood and wept or rejoiced with the spirit of the songs. I found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mine, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering, and protest.
My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers... They say, 'We came to liberate you....' I say: 'Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.' They say: 'No. We never... no shooting. No. No.' So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, 'Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.' And they have to believe me.
The solution was eventually found by Johannes Gutenberg, who made the breakthrough that finally established printing as the communication technology of the future. Similar ideas may have been under development around the same time in Prague and Haarlem. But in business, the key question is not about who else is in the race, it's about who gets there first. Johannes Gutenberg was the first to make the new technology work, ensuring his place in any history of the human race.
Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I spent in Prague as I most always did, when I was attacked by an illness never before experienced, which manifested itself in chilliness and painful weariness of the whole body. In order to ease my condition I took up Euclid's Elements and read for the first time his doctrine of ratio, which I found treated there in a manner entirely new to me. The ingenuity displayed in Euclid's presentation filled me with such vivid pleasure, that forthwith I felt as well as ever.
In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald's at the base of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays. The same thing happened in Prague, where I'd been yearning for some of the bohemianism of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw this one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a cafe, but then his cell phone rang and he started talking in aloud Texan twang.
People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.
Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.
The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.
Icon of Prague, the medieval bridge crossed the Vltava between Old Town and the Little Quarter. Gothic bridge towers rose on both sides, and the whole span — pedestrian-only — was lined by monumental statues of saints.
When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece.
or simply:
