“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.”
“Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.”
“Love is what brings us into this world.”
“Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.”
“I want to live at home. You can only write at home.”
“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.”
“Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.”
“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 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 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.”
“The subjects I wanted to write about – the mystery of the human soul, evil – didn’t interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.”
“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.”
“We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.”
“America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it’s a different country after 9/11.”
“We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together.”
“All our lives, we fight for certain ideals, and they get diluted, and then we have to fight for them again.”
“Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.”
“What I’m concerned with is what I would call the missing history – the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.”
“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 grew up in the countryside.”
“Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think – how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness.”
“Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.”
“I don’t think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.”
“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’ve known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.”
“I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.”
“When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other.”
“A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.”
“I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time.”
“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 love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.”
“For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom.”
“My wish is to humanize history.”
“’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.”
“It’s very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.”
“Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave.”
“I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.”
“There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.”
“My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories.”
“A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil.”
“I can’t rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.”
“Showing just the dark side doesn’t always work. The important thing is to show what we can learn from dark things, what good we find there.”
“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.”
“People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.”
“Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature.”
“Being in the public eye is easy for me because I come from a family of four generations of teachers, so I’m used to being around books and discussions. But to write, I very much need to be alone.”
“What is life about? Two things: love and death.”
“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.”
“Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.”
“I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.”
“I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person.”
“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.”
“The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.”
“Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn’t true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.”
“I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women.”
“I do not remember any questions in my childhood other than questions about death and about loss, and it was clear that the books that filled the house were not as interesting as the conversations outside.”
“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.”
“I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. All are very dear to me.”
“I’m interested in little people. ‘The little, great people’ is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.”
“I have collected the history of ‘domestic,’ ‘indoor’ socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being… a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.”
“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.”
“From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.”
“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 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.”
“Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.”
“Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.”
“I don’t hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people… I love Ukraine very much.”
“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.”
“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 take a very long time to write my books – from five to ten years.”
“All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.”
“I name the genre that I write in as ‘novel of voices.’”
“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.”
“There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.”
“We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.”
“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.”
“Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.”
“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.”
“There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.”
“I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time.”
“I’m not a public person.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.”
“I love how humans talk.”
“No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women’s stories I heard as a child.”
“For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.”
“My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.”
“Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.”
“I don’t love great ideas. I love the little human being.”
“We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.”
“Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women’s emancipation is only a slogan in – but also, I should say, in many places outside – the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers’ toil.”
“I’m interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.”
“The books that I’m writing, you can write them only when you’re amongst your people. You’re not going to find it on the Internet. You’re not going to hear it there.”
“I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas.”
“When I was a child, women spoke to me of how all they had was their memories, how their husbands went to war and never came back, so many tragedies. That chorus of voices filled my consciousness. It was part of life itself.”
“I will never write fiction.”
“Journalists do not write about human feelings.”
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