Svetlana Alexievich

“In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train... I listen... More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.”

“What you have to remember about Belarus is that it's a small state - it has a population of less than 10m people - and like many small states, it has to be very careful about its relationships.”

“There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.”

“'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.”

“We thought we'd leave communism behind, and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can't leave this and become free, because these people don't understand what freedom is.”

“I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'”

“I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.”

“I'm interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits - or disdains.”

“Communism has not died. We naively thought in the '90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back.”

“For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom.”

“I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.”

“I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.”

“From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.”

“Is there anything more frightening than people?”

“I will never write fiction.”

“In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

“In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively.”

“Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg.”

“I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn't that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult.”

“What is life about? Two things: love and death.”