Time & Perspective Quote by Milos Forman

That little pileup of qualifiers - "for the first time", "to the United States", "visiting" - is Forman quietly marking distance before he lands the punchline: "absolutely fascinated by New York". He frames the moment like a director blocking a scene. We see the newcomer at the edge of the set, still insisting he is only passing through, while the city is already casting him.

Forman arrived from a Czechoslovakia where public life was monitored and culture was policed; New York, by contrast, sells you noise as freedom. The fascination isn t just tourist awe at skyscrapers. It s the seduction of a place that turns anonymity into permission, that lets you reinvent yourself without asking for papers or ideology first. Saying "New York" instead of "America" is the key tell: he isn t praising the nation-state, he s praising the chaotic, immigrant-built engine room where languages collide and no single authority controls the script.

There s also a professional subtext. Forman made films about outsiders grinding against institutions (One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest, Amadeus, Hair). New York is a living version of that theme: a city where the system is loud, but the individual is louder. "Absolutely fascinated" reads less like a neutral observation than the origin story of an artist who found, in one city, a new vocabulary for rebellion - not slogans, but energy, crowds, and the exhilarating feeling that life is unsupervised.