"He was like a kid, pushing buttons and going, whoa!"

Today playwright dissident and the president Václav Havel died aged 75. Havel was a signatory of Charta 77 and one of the leaders of the movement that led to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Then he became president of Czechoslovakia and in 1993 the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic. Despite surgery because of lung cancer in 1996 he stayed in the position until 2003.

Since last Spring he suffered from severe respiratory ailments. In March he premiered his last film "Leaving." When the Dalai Lama visited his friend Havel earlier this week he expressed concers about ailing him and offered Tibetan medicine. Sunday morning he died in his weekend house.

Keith Richards on Václav Havel in his autobiography "Life," 2010:

"At the tail end of the Steel Wheels tour we liberated Prague, or so it felt. One in Stalin's eye. We played a concert there soon after the revolution that ended the communist regime. "Tanks Roll Out, Stones Roll In" was the headline. It was a great coup by Vaclav Havel, the politician who had taken Czechoslovakia through a bloodless coup only months earlier, a brilliant move. Tanks were going out, and now we're going to have the Stones. We were glad to be a part of it.

Havel is perhaps the only head of state who has made, or would imagine making, a speech about the role that rock music played in political events leading to a revolution in the Eastern Bloc of Europe.

'He was like a kid, pushing buttons and going, whoa!'

He is the one politician I'm proud to have met. Lovely guy. He had a huge brass telescope in the palace, once he was president, and it was focused on the prison cell where he did six years. "And every day I look through there to try and figure things out." We lit the state palace for him. They couldn't afford to do it, so we asked Patrick Woodroffe, our lighting guru, to relight the huge castle. Patrick set him up, Taj Mahal'd him.

We gave Vaclav this little white remote control with a tongue on it. He walked around lighting up the palace, and suddenly statues came alive. He was like a kid, pushing buttons and going, whoa! It's not often you get to hang with presidents like that and say, Jesus, I like the cat."

- Keith Richards on Václav Havel in his autobiography "Life," 2010.