Svetlana Alexievich

“I don't remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans. After the war, we children lived in a world of women. What I remember most is that women talked about love, not death.”

“I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same.”

“Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.”

“I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.”

“My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody - simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing, and beautiful women.”

“I want to live at home. You can only write at home.”

“I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.”

“I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.”

“A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil.”

“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.”

“Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.”

“When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other.”

“I was born in a big city - Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine - but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk.”

“Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire.”

“I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time.”

“How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.”

“Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.”

“I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented: there is so much to it; the truth is varied and scattered across the world.”

“My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories.”

“We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.”