A biography for Svetlana Alexievichhasn’t been written yet.
“There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.”
“I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish 'The Unwomanly Face of War,' but then it changed.”
“Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature.”
“Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave.”
“I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.”
“Many times, I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people and wanted to cry.”
“To be in conflict with the authorities is one thing. We Russian writers have got used to that. But to be in conflict with your own people - that is truly terrible.”
“I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women.”
“You might say that my work is just simply lying on the ground, and I go and I gather it, and I pick it up, and I put it together.”
“Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.”
“My wish is to humanize history.”
“I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person.”
“Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.”
“America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it's a different country after 9/11.”
“Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.”
“We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together.”
“Journalists do not write about human feelings.”
“I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.”
“A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.”
“Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.”