Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love crossing borders.
I'm too neurotic to be a therapist.
It's impossible to be ethnically pure.
I got my first passport in 1989, when I was 28.
I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.
Flights' grew out of a time when I was travelling a lot.
I didn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.
I found Leonora Carrington's 'The Hearing Trumpet' really funny.
I'm not one of those people who easily judges something or someone.
To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.
I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity.
We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.
The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.
I tell stories and try to do it honestly so that people are interested and enjoy them.
I would like to say to my friends in Poland: Let's make good choices, vote for democracy.
I adore Stanley Kubrick, all of his films were different, not just in subject but tonally.
I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.
Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.
In today's world everything is political. We are a statement - our clothes, haircut, the way we act.
Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.
Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.
The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.
I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.
A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive.
I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.
Education, school should prepare us not to morally judge everyone, but to be able to find our own truth in this world of various points of view.
We invented a history of Poland as a tolerant, open country, a country that has not been tainted by any atrocities committed against its minorities.
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.
I try to do my job and be a decent person, and a decent person has the courage to face what is not necessarily pleasant, what is perhaps dark and troublesome.
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.
I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover.
From death's perspective, there are no differences between people; there are no presidents or flight attendants, no faiths or nations. There is just the person, always dear.
In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.
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.
I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.
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.
I believe in literature which ties people together, that highlights what people have in common, despite the differences - color, sexual orientation, or anything which may separate us on the surface.
I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
Anglo-Saxons have a view that history is ordered and chronological, and I think that fed into the development of the realist middle-class novel. You know, the ones you read on your sofa with a nice cup of tea.
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.
But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.