Quotes by Havel, Vaclav

You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take >>

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his >>

People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well tha >>

Quotations about Anecdotes

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. >>

Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a >>

With a tale, for sooth, he comet unto you; with a tale which holdeth c >>

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.

Havel, Vaclav