Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I grew up in the countryside.
Journalists do not write about human feelings.
I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'
I don't love great ideas. I love the little human being.
We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.
I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.
A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.
I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.
I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.
The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.
I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time.
I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas.
People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.
I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.
Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.
Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.
For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.
Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.
No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women's stories I heard as a child.
I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women.
There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.
Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.
I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time.
Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.
It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.
America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it's a different country after 9/11.
There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.
Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave.
I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much.
We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.
Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.
All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.
From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.
All our lives, we fight for certain ideals, and they get diluted, and then we have to fight for them again.
Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature.
Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.
Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.
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.
Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.
Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.
What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.
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 love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.
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.
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.
My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories.
The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.
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.
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.