Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

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.
I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.
I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.
I want to live at home. You can only write at home.
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.
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.
I will never write fiction.
I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.
I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.
I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.
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.
I'm not a public person.
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.
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.
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.
It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.
I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that, and finally, I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts; I'm writing a history of human feelings.
I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.
Journalists do not write about human feelings.
Love is what brings us into this world.
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AuthorName
Svetlana Alexievich
Profession
Journalist
BirthDate
31 May, 1948
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