Milos Forman Quotes

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.

I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

I'd much rather fail than do something like 'The Chorus Line' movie, sanitized and Hollywoodized.

I think I deliberately sold out a couple of times. I picked the songs that I thought would do well in the marketplace, even though I didn't really love the song.

And I maintain good relationships with all the studios so I've never been bullied into any cut, frankly.

As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.

In TV, there's so much compromise, it does start to grate a bit. But if you're a writer or an actor, it really is the place to be.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.

Political or religious dissenters are the plague of every totalitarian regime.

An attempt to scrutinize men’s thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

It’s really very hard to tell people to think at work but not at home.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

I know, as an actor, you have to negotiate, but I can't handle the whole idea that art and commerce are synonymous. It drives me nuts.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

Some musicians don't have strong opinions, or they deliberately don't have strong opinions because they want to try and sell as many records as possible.

I love 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.