Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.
Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.
Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.
Polish literature can be interesting to the world. I'm happy to be the trailblazer.
Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.
Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.
Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.
Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.
State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party.
The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.
The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.
To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.
Two centuries ago, when our nation lost its sovereignty and was partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria, Polish Romantics like the poet and nationalist Adam Mickiewicz declared that independence would come only with great sacrifice. Ever since, this myth of the martyr, or messianic victim, has emerged during times of national crisis.
Unfortunately, as hate speech has proliferated, no one in Poland has been held responsible. The police take people's statements and dismiss them. This tacit consent has demoralized weakened minds.
We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.
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